


Some Affair

by equestrianstatue



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, London era, M/M, Non-Platonic Twosomes, Platonic Threesomes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-11
Updated: 2018-09-11
Packaged: 2019-07-10 23:58:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 23,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15960335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/equestrianstatue/pseuds/equestrianstatue
Summary: When I first met you, you were so— unformed. And then I spoke and bade you cast aside your shame, and Captain Flint was born into the world.How the Hamiltons made Captain Flint.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Talk about a group effort. This fic would not have been possible without a stellar beta read by Mel, who went above and beyond to solve all of my 18th-century problems; bespoke historical consultancy from ailcia, fanfiction doctor for hire; and, of course, the absolutely stunning illustrations by toastie-the-know.

**i.**  

 

Miranda Barlow had made the acquaintance of Lord Thomas Hamilton at nineteen years of age. He, twenty-two, and already known for his political ambition, was notable initially for conversing with her for upwards of ten minutes without so much as a wandering glance from her face.

Miranda’s mother had prepared her most thoroughly, upon her reaching an age of eligibility, for the wolves and jackals she would most certainly encounter around the drawing-rooms and dance-floors that she would now inhabit. If they were such wolves and jackals, she had asked her mother, why was it deemed necessary that she must be thrown to them?

“Your tongue, madam,” replied her mother, “is your least marketable quality.”

Being prepared for such an onslaught of danger, Miranda had found her entry into society something of a disappointment. She had looked forward to intrigue and excitement, and discovered instead that she must converse for any length of time with men who were bores, pedants and idiots. The ladies she met were to begin with frosty and impenetrable, her new presence a challenge to their small empires of influence.

Nonetheless, she judged the situation overall to be an improvement on the schoolroom, and so bore it well. Before long she had made a little name for herself as a wit, something that stood her in good stead in some circles and markedly less so in others. At the more tedious gatherings she could not entirely ignore the feeling that she was little more than a filly being inspected at market, but it was some comfort to know that she deserved to go at a good price.

Under such circumstances, Thomas was a revelation. On the evening they met he had run almost without preamble on a discourse of the natural rights of man, with an enthusiasm so far removed from the usual asininity of small talk that Miranda was quite taken aback by it. Moreover, it did not seem to occur to Thomas that a girl of her age might lack either interest in such a topic or the sense to comprehend it. The conversation ran on to Hobbes, Locke, Descartes, Thomas interested enough in her opinion on them all that he quite neglected to fetch her a drink. He listened to her, his eyes keen with attention, twirling the stem of his glass absently between thumb and forefinger— before picking up the thread of some unexpected thought and pulling it in an entirely different direction. Conversing with him commanded her full attention, and yet felt somehow very easy, very natural, like a dance learned in childhood to which one can suddenly recall the steps.

Miranda supposed that from that night onwards she loved him, although having little to compare it to, she did not question a great deal what that might mean. She understood that it had something to do with wanting above all to be near somebody for a great length of time, and she had never before met anyone whose company she desired more than Thomas’s. So she contrived at first to seek him out at dances and to be sat with him at dinners, although the contrivance was not much needed, since Thomas seemed always quite as pleased to find her as she him. Often she would discover him in a group of men— patiently encouraging the opinion of some stammering boy, or delicately tearing to shreds the pronouncements of some startlingly prominent Duke— but always talking, talking. When she caught his eye, mid-sentence, his brow would twitch in private, pleased recognition: something that translated roughly as _Thank goodness you’re here._ And either she would be called upon to lend her weight to the matter in discussion, or Thomas would simply extricate himself from the conversation, take her by the arm, and lead her smiling away.

It was not two months into their acquaintance that it became clear to Miranda that Thomas’s regard for her intellect over her beauty was not a studied virtue, but rather a natural state in him. This discovery she bore with equanimity. She reflected that for one person to be all things to one other person was not really at all a desirable state of affairs. The debt between them would surely become too great, the attachment eventually stifling in its magnitude. And so, considering Thomas’s increasingly significant presence in her life, it was perhaps for the best that he would not also become her lover.

Nonetheless, it was Miranda’s suggestion, eighteen months later, that they should marry.

“My dear,” said Thomas, with not insignificant surprise, “I beg your pardon?”

They were sat in the drawing-room of Miranda’s father’s house, where Thomas was becoming a fairly regular, fairly approved guest. Her parents liked his manners, although there was some faint wariness around his general reputation. “A radical, supposedly?” had been her father’s only comment, after the first time they were introduced. Thomas was, nevertheless, permitted to wait on her in private if he called in the morning.

Now, leaning back in her customary chair, Miranda said, “You will have to marry eventually, will you not?”

“It is an event I had hoped to postpone.” Thomas, opposite her on the sofa, had spread his hands over his knees.

“Yes— another ten years, perhaps even twenty, before the question will be raised in earnest. But by then you will be very old, and quite unable to secure so excellent a match as me.”

Thomas smiled. “That I do not doubt.” 

“Well, then, why should you wait? I am quite unattached at present, and sadly lacking in other options of interest.”

“That,” said Thomas, “I do doubt. Indeed you have any number of suitors available to you currently, and dozens more, I am sure, still to come. Surely among them will be at least one whom you like. I do not see the attraction in consigning yourself to me.”

“Oh, there are all sorts of attractions.” Miranda had, indeed, thought about this idea at some length, its costs and benefits carefully weighed. “Imagine our house!— the most fashionable destination in London, surely, filled with the most interesting people and all sorts of entertainments. One another on hand whenever one looks for comfort or conversation. A great library. A very fine cook, presumably. We would be terribly well-respected and terribly happy.”

Thomas, one corner of his mouth raised, his head moving from side to side only very slightly, said, “Miranda, I— ”

“And my dozens of suitors would be perfectly welcome to visit us there, don’t you think?”

Thomas paused, momentarily surprised. It was an expression that Miranda particularly liked on him, in part because it was so rare. Then he said, “Yes, I would imagine so.”

“And a great many of your friends.”

“Indeed.”

“A most beneficial and harmonious arrangement.”

“Yes, entirely.”

“But one that might be rarely found. Can you think of another husband quite so accommodating?”

Thomas’s eyes were bright with amusement. “One or two, perhaps. I ought to propose before you receive a better offer.” She laughed, and then he said, “You do know that I love you?”

“That,” she said, “is why I asked.”

And so: the courtship, carefully managed. Their preference for one another’s company had understandably not escaped attention, and now the attention needed only to be encouraged. This was organised chiefly by Miranda, who had learnt quite how to bring a rumour to its highest ebb through little but well-placed evasive answers.

Thomas, meanwhile, was happy to be directed by her. For a man with such capacity for strategic thought, and with a well-practised necessity for discretion, he made a shockingly poor hand at anything approaching deviousness. But he seemed to enjoy the mischief of the escalating pretence well enough. The walks in the Park, the gifts of jewellery and books; the modest suggestions, when questioned, that Miranda surely had her eye on some other fellow, that they were good friends and nothing more. She taught him to brush his hand against her shoulder, her wrist, as if he had not meant to, as if he ought not to have done it but could not help himself. He was a quick study.

She kissed him once at a party, away at the bottom of the gardens of a house in Hampstead. Far enough out of sight to play at secrecy, but all too easy to spot from the upper walks and the balconies. He stilled, startled, as she pressed her mouth to his, up on her toes to reach him. “Like you mean it,” she whispered, smiling, against his cheek. “Imagine, if you could only let them see— ” and then he kissed her back, sudden and intent, his arm snaking tightly around her waist.

“I do mean it, you know,” he murmured, after they had lingered there for a little longer, and were making their way slowly back up to the house.

By the time the official engagement was announced, ratified with slightly surprised approval by both of their families, theirs was the most talked-about love match of the season. The marriage itself followed soon after, and at twenty-one years old, Miranda woke up to discover herself Lady Hamilton.

This new life unfolded much as she had imagined. She and Thomas lived well, and both their social standing and Thomas’s career, balanced as they were on the knife-edge of public opinion, advanced more than they did not. Thomas, irrepressible in his ideals, made enemies of powerful people and friends of more powerful people still. Miranda, with a little more care, navigated the corridors of power that were a new kind of drawing-room gossip, concerned less with the amorous prospects of eligible young people and more with the doings of married ones. 

She and Thomas, however, seemed to be quite the happiest couple she knew, almost certainly due in part to the lack of sexual jealousy between them. This in itself probably helped to raise suspicions among those who made it their business to raise them. But the talk was another thing that Miranda learned to bear, smiling, unconcerned, unruffled— and more often than not with Thomas smiling beside her, his casually fond hand at her elbow, her waist. It was very difficult for any rumour to take hold that suggested that they might make one another unhappy.

There were a string of lovers, of course. Some involvements were prolonged, some fleeting, some affectionate, some strictly carnal. Miranda’s tastes were varied, although the structure of her life meant that more often than not she took up with the kind of opportunistic bachelor who frequented their salons and soirees— the very wolves and jackals her mother had warned her about, she supposed, although they tended to be far tamer than the warnings had suggested. Some made her laugh; some were poor conversationalists, but made up for it in bed; more than one proposed marriage, along with various ingenious schemes to bring such a possibility about. At these she smiled sweetly, and reminded her bedfellows of the cardinal rule of these affairs: that above all else she loved her husband.

Thomas’s tastes, meanwhile, ran mostly to a particular athletic form coupled with a ready wit. Notably there was a boxer of some renown, a young parliamentary clerk, and, for a time, a coachman. This last caused Miranda some slight consternation, the man’s position in their service lending itself to a useful discretion, but also to a sense of danger that, unusually, she found difficult to express to Thomas. Apart from anything else she was loathe to make Thomas unhappy. The boy made him happy, and seemed perfectly decent, and she trusted Thomas’s judge of character well enough. All the same, she trusted his runaway heart just a little less.

Eventually the matter was brought to a close when the coachman took a new position near his family in the country, and all, it seemed, ended amicably. Nonetheless, a week or so after his departure, Miranda suggested, with as much delicacy as she could manage, that Thomas might not do well to keep about him anything that could evidence an attachment. Thomas, his thumb stroking restively at the spine of the book in his lap, had nodded absently. But it was not until some months later that he finally admitted to a small packet of letters: and after he had burnt them, he encircled her in his arms, and she kissed him gently on the forehead.

*

The entry of Lieutenant McGraw into Miranda’s life was an unremarkable one. For some weeks she knew him by report only as, in Thomas’s words, the man who might make or mar the New Providence plan. Such an Admiralty appointment had been expected since Thomas’s father had conceived the idea to begin with. Miranda’s existing understanding of the Admiralty suggested that, while the Lieutenant would presumably have some knowledge of the Bahama Islands, his social standing was likely to have played a far greater part in his selection than anything quite so useful as his qualities as either a sailor or a statesman.

Nonetheless, he would wield a deal of power in the coming negotiations, and ought not to be entirely disregarded. Miranda’s chiefest concern was that Thomas, who was perfectly capable of doing either, might remember to charm the man a little rather than estrange him entirely with an onslaught of dogged self-belief. But she realised as soon as she first set eyes on the Lieutenant that she need not have worried; that the frank admiration with which he already watched her husband meant that Thomas had been working his particular magic. There was, she sometimes thought, not a person in the world whom Thomas could not bring around to his way of thinking if he really applied himself to it.

“And like everyone in the Admiralty,” Thomas told her, over breakfast, “he wants what the Admiralty wants— to see an economic success made of New Providence. But unlike everyone in the Admiralty, I do not think he has a preconceived idea of how that ought to be achieved. Or, rather, he does, but he is not wedded to it. Or at least he will not be when we are through.”

Miranda did not necessarily doubt this, but she raised her eyebrows in amusement nonetheless. 

“I only mean,” Thomas said, “that he is uncommonly practical, and certainly he sees very clearly when the means justify an end. If he believes that the end will be as he and his colleagues desire, he will bend himself to the means most willingly.”

“I do not see the Lieutenant bending willingly to anything,” Miranda observed. “He does not give the impression of it.”

“There, I think, you are wrong. His situation forces him to belong to many positions at once, and to maintain it he must bend to all of them without breaking— a feat of quite extraordinary versatility. Do you not think so?”

“Versatility?” Miranda asked. She had met McGraw in person now a handful of times. He had been rigidly polite in her presence, to a degree that made her suspect that he might not be entirely indifferent to her appearance and her reputation, although she had also thought it possible that it was a manner drilled into him so deeply as to have become a permanent state of being. 

“Did you know that he was bred a common sailor?”

“Was he?”

“And yet he impresses his captains so well that he is a Lieutenant by twenty. Berthed, presumably, with the incomparably tedious sons and nephews of the Sea-Lords— and yet his star ascends so far above theirs that he is assigned liaison to one of the first families in the country. Oh, and despite having been at sea since childhood, he appears to have found the time to read Homer, and has upon more than one occasion quoted him to me, in translation. I rather think that is a man made to live always in more than one world at one time.”

"My Lord," said Miranda, as it pleased her to call him when he became fanciful, "were you ever at sea? Perhaps they are all reading Homer."

"You know I was not," Thomas replied, smiling a little. "But I know very well the natural order of things, and I know what it is to many to see it disturbed.” After a moment, he shrugged, a customarily loose gesture, and picked up his coffee-cup. “And so I think he will prove himself flexible. Although goodness knows in the meantime he is more than happy to argue a point almost beyond reason.”

“Oh!” said Miranda. “Quite unlike you.”

“My dear,” said Thomas, “I think you ought to spend more time with the Lieutenant; you would get on most admirably. Indeed, in his more tenacious moments, he rather reminds me of you.”

This claim Miranda was intrigued by, although she did not see the reflection herself. McGraw did begin to visit their house more frequently, though was usually shut up with Thomas on matters of business for hours at a time. Once or twice Thomas persuaded the Lieutenant to stay and dine with them both, on which occasions he behaved with a sort of studied courteousness. His conversation was limited largely to briefly-expressed pleasantries, although, if pressed, he could be prevailed upon to discuss the economic and social status of Nassau. If Miranda had met the Lieutenant at a party she did not think she would have made much of an effort to retain his company— and yet Thomas evidently liked him. She wondered what it was that he liked that she could not yet see.

Miranda was a little surprised when Thomas mentioned, one afternoon, that he had invited McGraw to their salon that evening, and she was more than a little surprised to hear that he had accepted. She was not entirely sure that he would enjoy the experience. She could not imagine he would thrive in the midst of a number of talkative strangers, and she had in the back of her mind, as she dressed for the evening, the idea she ought to keep her eye on him. It would be very like Thomas to forget himself, be swept away in some conversation or another, and abandon the Lieutenant to the room. 

As she had expected, McGraw said little once he had arrived, although his quiet air seemed to give off not so much discomfort as concentration. Miranda found him on more than one occasion listening keenly to the conversation taking place: often to Thomas, but sometimes attached unobtrusively to another circle of discussion, always somehow contriving to excuse himself before his own opinion might be solicited. She realised he was navigating the room with quite as much deliberate care, if not at all the same goal, as Thomas. She watched them both, much interested, even as she was kept busy introducing various of her guests to one another, and preventing others from offending each other too irreparably.

Miranda had been instructing a servant to fetch up more wine when out of the corner of her eye she saw that the Lieutenant had been cornered by the fireplace. He was being talked to by the Baron Arundell, a rather vigorous conversationalist. She was beginning to wonder if she ought to intercept them when she heard McGraw say, “I do not know that my opinion will be an interesting one.”

“Nevertheless, sir, I should like to hear it.”

McGraw’s voice was low and neutral, but not embarrassed, when he said, “It strikes me that neither of us is entirely qualified to participate in such a debate.”

“Does it?” asked Arundell. “And to whom do you suggest we might defer?”

“I would have thought that was obvious.” Raising his head, McGraw caught Miranda’s eye, and said, “Lady Hamilton, I beg your pardon, but might we prevail upon you to settle a point of argument?”

“With pleasure.”

McGraw asked, “Would you agree, ma’am, that any man might achieve improvement of the mind by engaging in debate with his peers?”

“Naturally.”

“And you, my Lord?”

“Of course, or else what are we all doing here? I am suggesting only that such a man might reach his greatest potential in an environment free from distraction— that there is a form of debate entirely pure, entirely detached from the day-to-day concerns of our lives.”

“I see,” said McGraw, gravely. “Unlike this very charming evening, where such concerns are so very present, and we are at peril of distraction from all quarters. Indeed, you, ma’am, must find that the presence of so many men makes it difficult to concentrate on your strive for rationalism.”

Miranda, who had some inkling of where the conversation might be leading, said, “Not particularly. One would find it uncommonly difficult to achieve anything if the presence of men was a preclusion to doing so.”

“I see,” said McGraw, and then, to Arundell, “Perhaps, then, it is a weakness ascribed only to men, to find the presence of women so diverting that they can no longer apply their full powers of thought.”

With a small, polite bow, Arundell said, “Lady Hamilton is very beautiful and very accomplished, and there is nobody who would be foolish enough to imagine her salon is not the most popular in London.”

“You are very kind.”

“And yet,” said McGraw, “we are only playing at philosophy here, did you say?”

“You have misunderstood me,” said Arundell, caught somewhere between embarrassment and irritation. “Lady Hamilton, I meant no offence.”

“Of course not; I would never think it.”

“I am only remarking on the difference between the conversation one might encounter here, to that in Parliament, say, or even in the coffee-houses.”

“Mr Descartes, I suppose,” mused McGraw, “was playing at philosophy too— what with having to form his ideas in an environment so distractingly impure.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The salons of Paris,” said Miranda, smiling, and she thought she saw, for the briefest moment, McGraw’s mouth twitch. “Terribly difficult for Descartes, I imagine, having to test and refine his great works in the company of quite so many women.”

“Come, now, sir— you are misrepresenting me.”

“Am I?” McGraw said. “I am extremely sorry for it. I did not mean to.” 

McGraw’s face was very mild, devoid of expression, as Arundell excused himself, and remained so while he and Miranda were left briefly alone by the fireplace. Miranda had rather wanted to laugh, as she and Thomas would have done, co-conspirators. But she said, equally mildly, “Mr Descartes left Paris before very long, did he not? Rather sick of the social life.”

McGraw inclined his head in consideration. “That’s as may be. But I have always supposed that even the briefest interludes of one’s life may still build one’s ideas. Would you agree?”

Yes, Miranda said, she thought she did; but it was at that moment Thomas appeared at the Lieutenant’s elbow, flashing Miranda a brief, sparkling smile, and pulled him away to meet somebody else.

This conversation lingered in Miranda’s mind throughout the evening. McGraw’s gently barbed tone had not held any of the triumph she was used to hearing when listening to men win arguments. It had been a small exercise of power either purely for private entertainment, or for her benefit. She was not entirely sure which possibility was of most interest. But she had enjoyed it, and she would have liked to see him do it again. It had not quite been like watching Thomas do the same, although the ease and precision with which McGraw had chosen his words was familiar enough.

“He is not so dull as all that, then, is he?” she asked Thomas, in the dressing chamber between their bedrooms, in the early hours of the morning. She was unpinning her hair, while Thomas sat a little lopsidedly in a chair, reading. He liked, he had once said, the familiarity, the ritual, of watching her prepare for bed, even when he was not actually watching.

“Who?” Thomas asked, and then, when she raised her eyebrows, said, “Well— why would you have thought otherwise?”

“I couldn’t say.” Miranda shook her head, put down the last pins, and picked up her hairbrush. “Men are a constant surprise to me.”

*

“Why not invite the Lieutenant?” Miranda would say, smiling, on a Saturday morning, when Thomas would come in to her bedroom, dressed and suggesting a visit to some recently-acquired work of art, or to the theatre, or to the pleasure-gardens. Often enough the Lieutenant begged their pardon but was not at liberty to join them today; but often enough he did.

Miranda thought that he must enjoy their company, or else he would not accept it so often. But then again, it was possible McGraw took this to be an unconventional but necessary element of his professional assignment. She thought, however, that she had begun to detect some of the currents of interest beneath the surface of his manners. McGraw knew less of art than he evidently did of literature and of philosophy, and she soon realised that he was, in fact, extremely curious about it: that his patient questions about composition and colour were not merely polite. She liked to talk to him about portraiture, sculpture, the classical masters and their contemporary followers, and she liked the concentrated expression he took on as he listened to her. Thomas, meanwhile, would wonder aloud who the models had been, how long they had sat for, whether they had embodied any of the qualities of their historical or heavenly likenesses.

“Well, they were cold, I would have thought,” McGraw said, as Thomas inspected the carved figures of Helen and Paris, displayed in the hallway of a town-house belonging to the Marquess of Winchester. Paris held Helen aloft in his arms, her marble fingers denting the marble flesh of his shoulder. In the flurry, presumably, of Helen’s abduction, both parties appeared to have lost most of their clothing.

Thomas laughed at this, and Miranda did too. She caught McGraw’s eye, and he smiled, quickly, briefly.

“They might have been lovers,” said Miranda, after she had studied the statue for a little longer. Certainly the ardour did not seem all to be on Paris’s part. Thomas had wandered onwards, into a drawing-room hung with paintings, and McGraw had been about to follow him, but he paused as she spoke. “Her hand at his cheek, here, that caress— either that is real, or they were very good actors.”

McGraw looked as directed at the hand in question. “Or it was a very good sculptor,” he said.

“Whose part do you take?” Miranda asked him. 

“Ma’am?”

“Where do your sympathies lie? With Paris, or with Menelaus?”

McGraw considered his answer. “With the lady,” he said, eventually. “Besides, there is no Menelaus here to make his case.” He followed Thomas from the room.

Miranda had noticed the Lieutenant’s tendency to avoid being alone with her without her husband present. Another formality, she had thought, at first, though it was long past the point at which it must be clear that Thomas was not concerned by it. She would have liked to see whether, alone, McGraw’s demeanour could be cracked; she thought that it must, that it did, when he and Thomas were behind closed doors. More than once she had even heard them laughing.

Even so, her reading of the small signals of the Lieutenant’s behaviour had improved. The particular upright self-containment of his body when she was in the room, and the way that his eyes flickered away whenever she regarded him too directly, as she had done just now. This had not changed since they first met, she supposed, but it was she who had begun to behave differently. It was she who spoke to him more often, stood habitually closer, even attempted now and again to provoke him to amusement. Sometimes she thought this pleased him. Other times he seemed embarrassed by it. Sometimes it was both.

It was clear enough, however, that McGraw would do nothing. Miranda, for a time, believed she would do nothing either. She enjoyed the potential of something that did not exist but was inches away from doing so, and of both of them knowing it. In some obscure way she rather liked the Lieutenant’s faint discomfort, the care with which he picked his way through their interactions. It was a protracted kind of pleasure with which she was very familiar. Indeed she had more than once discovered, after going to bed with someone, that the relationship had been far more interesting before they had done so.

There was also, of course, the consideration that Thomas by now would have described McGraw not only as an Admiralty liaison but as his friend— and McGraw, perhaps under duress, would likely have done the same. Miranda rarely, if ever, took up with Thomas’s friends. The entanglements quickly became too complicated, the rumours around them particularly difficult to manage, and, most often, the poor man’s discomfort at cuckolding Thomas more difficult to manage still.

And oh, besides, she was perfectly aware of Thomas’s quiet, persistent interest in McGraw. She had known it from Thomas’s very first description of him, praising at length his intelligence and bearing, with only the briefest mention of his being well-formed. She knew it from the particular, bright tone of voice Thomas took when he anticipated the Lieutenant’s arrival; she knew it from the open warmth of his expression when the Lieutenant was looking at him, and the covert appraisal of his gaze when he was not. But it seemed this interest had not been returned. McGraw and her husband spent time enough together that certainly there could not have been a lack of opportunity. And yet there had been none of the telltale signs of Thomas in the early stages of an involvement: the exuberant energy, the nights spent away, the familiar conversation: “My dear, you ought to know…”

The ideas of ownership, or jealousy, or betrayal, were difficult to conceptualise between Miranda and Thomas. Their private language did not really encompass the concepts. In the present situation Miranda did not know very well what the rules might be. She did not, in fact, know if there were any. But of most concern was that she found she did not know how to talk to Thomas about them. Nonetheless, Miranda wanted something from the Lieutenant, and she was not entirely sure what it was. She only knew that if she tried taking it, she might well be successful.

And so at last she kissed James McGraw, or she goaded him into kissing her, right there in her carriage. What was it Thomas had said?— a man made always to live in two worlds at once. Here he was, bidding the driver take her home, away from the danger of such a possibility, even as he yielded to it. Miranda yielded too, with both a sense of relief and a sharp, sudden twist of real desire. His hand, still resting on hers, was warm and strong, and she wanted him to touch her, wanted to feel its broad palm against her skin. 

She could take McGraw home— Thomas was not in the house— but she feared that the moment might fall away well before then. When she pulled back from him, his lips were parted, as if he were surprised at having actually kissed her. She climbed into his lap. He let her.

McGraw’s breath stuttered, and she thought, for a moment, that he was nervous, or worse, contrite. That he would ask her to stop, would apologise, would insist on stopping the carriage and being left at the roadside. But she put her hand to his cheek, and turned his face upwards.

“You are very beautiful,” she told him. It was true: his face was smooth, grave, and unusually alive with some unfamiliar energy. But the statement confused him. He frowned.

“You are— ” he said, and swallowed.

“Yes?”

“Incorrigible,” he murmured.

When she kissed him again, leaning down to meet his mouth, it was as if she had opened a vein. His mouth opened almost at once under hers. His hands became firm at her waist, and his body shifted beneath her skirts, pulling her closer. One hand moved to her neck, her shoulder, the exposed part of her chest. His indecorous single-mindedness was slightly shocking, after all this time. She had not imagined it would be quite this easy. At this rate they might— 

“James,” she said. She had never called him this before, although Thomas did, like he was some old schoolfriend. It surprised him, and he looked up at her. 

She hitched up her skirts a little higher, took his hand from her bosom, and brought it underneath her body. He breathed out, sharply, and then his fingers brushed against her, where she was growing wet. She let go of his hand, and he kept it there, running his finger through the shallows of her, and then two fingers, curving, firm, for her to rub against.

She closed her eyes for a moment, pressed down onto his hand. When she looked down at him again, his mouth was open, his eyes very bright.

“Could you be quick?” she asked.

There was a pause, and then he said, voice low, “Yes.”

His hand came away from her, and she moved up to give him room. He was swift, precise, unbuckling his belt, unfastening the placket of his breeches. He was already growing stiff, and when she reached down and touched him, he pushed upwards, pressing his cock into her open hand.

Very soon he was hard enough for Miranda to lower herself down onto him. She gasped, and he tensed, but was quite silent. He had had practice at that, she thought; his teeth pressed into his bottom lip, and his breath came through his nose. But then he leaned against the back of the carriage seat, and thrust his hips upwards, with some force. In her surprise she laughed, and he did it again, as she moved down to meet him: and then they were fucking briskly, with the rhythm of the carriage.

This was, she supposed, exactly what she had wanted: not only the heat and the pleasure and the secrecy of an assignation, but whatever this was. The unrelenting determination of McGraw’s movements, the hard grip of his hand at her waist. The moment where she felt the scrape of his teeth, very briefly, against her throat, as he buried his face in the crook of her neck. Indeed, she wanted more; she wanted to know where on earth this lived inside him, how deep it was beneath the skin, how consciously he held it at bay. She wanted to take him to bed and tug it out of him, fascinated and hungry.

She slid her fingers into McGraw’s hair just above the tie that held it back, and pressed her mouth to his forehead, his cheek. He was slowing, trying to still his hips, pressing them into the seat below them. But she drove down, harder, although she understood him: very foolish, very dangerous, but in that moment of urgency she wanted him to finish inside her. And he did, hot and sudden, his mouth open and noiseless, his body shuddering.

It seemed unlikely that the coachman could have remained entirely oblivious. But otherwise, once Miranda had climbed off and re-taken her seat, the thing was over. It was something that had been possible, and then it had been real, but now it was gone. It no longer existed. Except it existed still in the places that her hair had come loose, and in McGraw’s bowed head as he buttoned himself away, and in their uneven breath. It seemed even to exist in the hot, close air around them, the sound of the horses’ hooves striking on the cobbles. The sudden encroaching of the outer world into this small, moving space.

Miranda made a conscious effort to right herself, smoothing her skirts, re-pinning her hair. Then she heard McGraw say: “This cannot happen again.” His voice was barely above a rasp, and when she looked up at him, his expression did not so much command as implore this statement to be the truth.


	2. Chapter 2

**ii.**

 “You ought to know,” Miranda told him, as they took their tea together, “that the Lieutenant and I have been sharing a bed.”

Thomas had been expecting Miranda to confide this to him now for a week or more. Her reticence, he supposed, had been partly because of the political delicacy of their position, and perhaps also out of some consideration for the Lieutenant’s state of mind.

“Yes,” he said, “I had thought so.” Indeed, James’s behaviour in their most recent interview had made the situation abundantly clear. He had said very little, repeatedly lost his train of thought, and avoided looking directly at Thomas whenever possible, all signs that Thomas knew well from other men who believed that in bedding Miranda they had done him some severe disservice. James’s discomfort, however, was particularly notable, in part because it was evidently very great, and in part because it followed hard upon a period of accord between them that had fast been approaching a close friendship. After less than an hour Thomas had made excuses for them both to delay their work, and James had all but fled the room. 

Tapping his finger gently against the side of his tea-cup, Thomas chose his words carefully. “He is a little unsettled, do you not think?”

Miranda considered this, and then said, “It is something not quite within his control, and I suppose that disturbs him.”

“Well, as long as it is within yours.”

Miranda nodded slowly, and said, “Of course.”

“Give you both joy of it,” Thomas said, he always did. “I trust the both of you with one another, to be sure. My only concern is not to lose the Lieutenant’s company altogether. He is somebody I have come very much to rely upon. Do you think he will master himself enough for that?”

She did; and he did, before the next week was out. James did not quite return to his previous degree of ease in Thomas’s company— Thomas had been pleased to have reached a point at which the Lieutenant had begun to loosen his tongue, and he had a good dry wit that Thomas liked to tease out of him, and all of this work was to some degree undone. But with each meeting James began to behave a little less awkwardly, as the deceit he believed himself to be perpetrating became ingrained into him.

Thomas quite honestly did wish them joy of it; he had never seen the benefit in denying anyone a happiness. Nonetheless, he supposed there had been a little flame of hope in him that had lately been extinguished. He had thought— well, he had been more than aware of the way James looked sometimes at Miranda, furtive, fascinated, a little uneasy. But he had caught the same expression once or twice when Miranda had not been in the room. Thomas had wondered, at first, if it could be a return of James’s very initial self-consciousness in what he had perceived to be the grandeur of his surroundings. He had also wondered if it could be something else entirely. But he had given James signals enough, un-replied to, and opportunities enough, untaken. And yet Thomas had not entirely given up hope of a reciprocated interest. He reflected now that perhaps, uncharacteristically, he had allowed desire to cloud his judgement.

Although James and Miranda’s affair was conducted necessarily outside of his presence, it was not difficult for Thomas to observe the routine into which they settled. He developed a good sense of when he ought not to return home, and of where they might be when neither of them were there. He affected with ease not to notice the studied distance James put between himself and Miranda when they were all three in the same place. He tried not to consider in too much detail their imagined intimacy, and tried not to wonder, when James conceded a point in argument, whether it was done in honesty or in some sudden stab of penance. There was a careful accord between them, and Thomas thought he could learn to live quite happily within its articles.

It was a month or so into this new state of affairs that James accepted an invitation to make one of a dining party at their house, as he still did with some regularity: there was a guilty sort of courtesy in his attendance whenever either Thomas or Miranda requested it. The night was a long one, and the majority of the guests present for reasons more political than personal, including the prominent wife of a Marquess whose ear Thomas was currently manoeuvring to gain. And so much of the evening’s other conversation passed by without his notice, until, somewhere between the end of the meal and the end of the port, Thomas realised that James had apparently disappeared from his place at the other end of the table.

After a few minutes, when James did not return, Thomas made his excuses to the gentlemen still seated— none of whom, at varying stages of inebriation, took particular notice of them— and rose with the intention of discovering him. Only after he had left the dining-room did it occur to him that James was very likely in Miranda’s company, and ought under no circumstances to be discovered. In his surprise at his own slowness it occurred to Thomas that neither was he entirely sober. But at that moment he heard Miranda’s low, distinctive laugh. It came from the drawing-room, and was in the company of women’s voices, where she was holding court, still, and evidently rather more successfully than he had been. 

So he puzzled for a little longer over James’s absence. He looked into the smaller sitting-room in which Miranda sometimes entertained, which was empty, and the reception hall in which drinks had been served before dinner, which was empty too. Then at last an idea struck him. 

When he opened the door to the library, he found James stood with his back to him, head bowed, both arms braced against the mantelpiece, looking into its small fire. At the sound of the door, James straightened instantly, and turned. Seeing that it was Thomas, his expression relaxed, before tensing again into something more unreadable.

“I am sorry, my Lord,” James said. “I meant to return momentarily.”

Thomas closed the door behind him. “You are free to do in this house as you please,” he said. “I believe more than one of the honourable gentlemen are about to fall asleep in the decanter, so the table is on its way to breaking up, anyhow.”

James gave him the ghost of a smile, but did not reply.

Thomas, asked, unthinking, “What is the matter?”

His mouth had moved faster than his mind, otherwise he might have considered that the matter was very likely not something James would wish to speak to him about. But it occurred to Thomas in that moment— in the sudden comparative quiet that followed his remove from the dining-room, in the still-lingering image of James’s stiffly bowed neck— that the evening had not been entirely a pleasant one, although he himself had barely registered it. Thomas was so very used to it all: the would-be covert glances, the inevitable whispering, the conversations that halted at his approach. It was worse, of course, for Miranda, but she was even better practised at weathering this treatment with her customary smiling indifference.

Thomas had not for a moment imagined that for James the gossip would be a serious issue, especially since of the three of them James was neither the whore nor the cuckold, and so necessarily attracted the least ridicule. Indeed, public knowledge of an affair with Lady Hamilton was in some situations a positive benefit. But Thomas thought again of tonight’s company, of the stifled bursts of laughter and the slyly scrutinising tone that he was accustomed to ignoring entirely, even in their own house, and of James’s unhappy silence— and he looked at him again in surprise.

“Nothing, my Lord,” James said, now, in reply to his question. Even he must have realised that this sounded obviously untrue, because after a pause he continued, “I remembered the book of which Lady Hamilton was kind enough to make me a present. Despite her best intentions, you were right about the Spanish: mine is not at all up to the task. I thought of it again as I was passing the library.”

“Ah,” said Thomas. He moved to a shelf by the window, ran his finger along the spines, and pulled out another copy of _Don Quixote_ , this one in translation. “Then this is what you are looking for. Though before you read it, I must protest that my wife’s judgement of me is too harsh. I am not quite so romantic as this poor knight.”

“I will remember that,” said James, as Thomas gave him the book. He held it in one hand and moved his thumb across the edges of its many pages. “I do not think I will begin it at quite this moment,” he said, and Thomas laughed, “but thank you.”

“A gift,” said Thomas. “—Another gift.”

“I couldn’t— ” 

“Lieutenant, it is not my best copy.”

James looked up at him from the book and smiled. It was small and involuntary, in a way that Thomas found especially appealing, as if it was a happiness that he had been somehow tricked into displaying. “Then I am very grateful for it,” he said. “And I look forward to finding out what it does have to say about you.”

“Nothing that you do not already know, I shouldn’t think.”

“Well,” said James, and nodded towards the door. “I should…”

“Only if you wish. You are more than welcome to remain here and read, if you prefer. You might find Mr Cervantes more entertaining than the conversation currently to be found at the table. And there is no hurry for you to leave. Indeed you have a standing invitation to remain for the night, naturally, should it ever be more convenient.” 

Thomas had meant only that a room could very easily be made up for him, but in James’s expression of faint alarm, which resolved itself quickly into a schooled blankness, Thomas remembered himself once again. He wondered at his clumsiness this evening. To suggest that James spent the night in the house of the woman with whom most of London, by now, must know he was involved, was almost comically tactless. 

Thomas’s instinct was to move smoothly onwards, to pretend that there had been no rupture in their carefully-managed rapport. Yet something held him back: something in the quality of the momentary tension between them. It was not the first time Thomas thought he had felt it, but never quite so strongly as this. He and James had rarely had cause to drink very deeply in one another’s company, but that was not the crux of it. He had not, he was quite sure, imagined the flicker of James’s eyes over him just now, tentative but appraising, before his face had taken on its familiarly placid expression.

For a few seconds neither of them spoke, and then James said, “That is very kind of you, my Lord, but I must not press you so. I will take my leave, if it is not too early to be impolite.”

“It is not,” Thomas said. Emboldened, however, he took a step forward and clasped James briefly on his upper arm. James’s quick, sharp intake of breath was— new. “Until Thursday, then, I believe.”

There was a short silence in which Thomas could not entirely translate whatever it was that passed between them. James’s particular, taut stillness seemed a precursor to some abrupt action: there was a strange and wild moment when Thomas honestly thought that he might either be kissed, or be in receipt of some sudden violence. But then James simply said, “Thursday, yes,” shook Thomas by the hand, and quit the room.

Thomas’s head swam rather queasily. Very rarely had he felt his judgement so impaired. Not just tonight, but, he thought, in this whole damned affair. He could not remember being so repeatedly unable to parse his own heart. 

The rest of the evening seemed to pass in a blur, Thomas’s mind inescapably elsewhere, until the final guests had been helped into their carriages— until Miranda, hand on his shoulder, poured him a final cup of coffee. He looked up at her, put his hand on top of hers, and squeezed her fingers, very gently. She tightened hers on his shoulder.

“I did not see the Lieutenant take his leave,” Miranda remarked.

“He left an hour ago or more.”

Miranda sat down opposite him, the sitting-room’s small coffee-table between them. She arranged her skirts, carefully. “I had very little conversation with him tonight.”

“I think that he is not entirely happy.” Thomas frowned at his coffee-cup, rubbed at his brow. He found it unusually difficult to look at Miranda. But he managed to do so, and said, “I must tell you that I am— that is, I find it difficult to pretend that I am not uncommonly invested in his happiness.”

“Yes,” she said, softly. “I know.”

“Of course.” He forced himself to hold her gaze as he continued, “And I have come to wonder if he might not have a similar investment in mine.”

“I think,” said Miranda, her voice level, “that you are very likely right.” 

“I see,” said Thomas. He drank the end of his cup and put it down, and, tired as he was, he felt a slightly hysterical edge of amusement nudging at his nerves. “My dear,” he said, “do you think either of us could have predicted that pacifying the Bahamas would be such a complicated business?” 

*

The question that lived inside Thomas had begun to creep from one of _whether_ to one of _when_. It would vacillate, still. He was not used to this. He was accustomed to his thoughts arriving clearly and fully-formed, and not this tentative, changeable idea that seemed to slide out of the grip of his mind whenever he tried really to consider what it might mean to act upon it. He longed for a moment of clarity, of absoluteness, in which he could feel at home. But James, it seemed, was infinitely capable of removing these from him. 

That uneven, unpredictable sense of possibility was within in the room as Peter’s carriage clattered away, down the dark street outside the house. They had talked late into the night, he and Peter and Miranda and James, and now Peter had taken his leave: and what did that mean?

“I do not think we are lost,” Thomas said. “I think we will do very well.”

He spoke, as much as to anyone else, to himself. It was the only way he knew how to make something real, to speak it enough that its truth became worked unalterably into the words of it.

“Of course we will,” said Miranda, and he recognised in her voice exactly the same tone. Brisk, firm, reality-building.

James, standing away to one side of them both, his arms braced on the back of a chair, said nothing.

Thomas let out a long breath. For the first time in many hours, he felt the quiver of high activity subside from his blood, and he realised how tired he was. He thought of calling for more coffee, and then decided against it. Perhaps, he thought, he should simply go to bed— and send James away, ask him to return in the morning, with a clear head. But that would be absurd.

“Well, my dear,” Miranda said, rising from her chair, “if I am to be any use to you at all tomorrow, I must retire; would you mind?”

She smiled at him, and within it was a thousand things Thomas could not in that moment begin to untangle. As she bent to kiss his cheek he grasped unthinkingly at her hand, to feel her return the pressure. “Good-night, my dear,” she said, and then, after a moment, “Good-night, Lieutenant.” James murmured a reply in kind, but Thomas did not look at either of them as they spoke.

Miranda closed the door behind her. At the sound of it, Thomas looked up at James. He had not moved from his position, his fingers curled quite tightly around the chair’s back, but at Thomas’s glance he straightened. The air, Thomas thought, had become very thick, unbearably so.

James cleared his throat and said, “I think I ought to be going too.”

It was not four hours since Thomas had watched James launch his quite unprecedented attack on his father, and Thomas, frankly astonished into doing so, had kissed him. He had thought that if he did not kiss him his heart might simply burst; that not to kiss him would have been an unconscionable betrayal of his soul. That, Thomas supposed, had been the moment of clarity for which he had so ardently wished. But it had slipped away almost as abruptly as it had come. James had looked at him afterwards with a sort of amazed, wild-eyed panic. Thomas could not have guessed quite what his own face had displayed.

Thomas rose from his chair, and James’s expression now was not all that dissimilar. He was uncomfortable, although it was a discomfort that he hid almost immediately. But it had been there, if one was looking, which Thomas always was.

Indeed, for a few moments, Thomas allowed himself to study James’s face with the full attention and detail he had long wished to pay it. He let himself linger at the curve of his brow, the line of his cheek, the creases at his mouth. Under this consideration James did not entirely maintain his composure, and his throat gave a jerking movement as he swallowed.

Earlier, too, James had suggested afterwards at once that he might take his leave. But despite everything, despite Miranda sat there on the other side of the dining table, he had been unable to refuse Thomas’s request that he instead remain with them for the evening, that he play his part in helping to gather what support they could.

Now, he stood in silence, the set of his shoulders rigid, making no move towards the door, waiting either to be dismissed or instructed otherwise.

“James,” Thomas said, at length. “These past months I have asked a very great deal of you, and in return you have proved to be generosity itself. You have done more for me than I think any man deserved. And so I will not ask you for this.” At the sound of his voice James’s eyes had widened, and his jaw clenched. It was as if every part of his body wished to move, but had been held very firmly in place. “But nevertheless, I must tell you that if this is something you want, it is there for the taking.”

The moment in which nothing happened felt infinite. The ticking of the clock seemed to have slowed to an impossible pace. This, surely, was the very final chance at the thing. If James were to demur at this point, Thomas could not in good conscience pursue the matter any further. And, oh, how the the weight of the past months seemed suddenly to rest upon him: the combined heaviness of the caution, the silence, the wanting, God, the wanting, pressed in on Thomas from all angles.

But then quite suddenly it was over, and Thomas had missed, it seemed, the moment of decision. All he knew was that James was in front of him, and that he had caught Thomas’s face in both his hands, and kissed him so desperately that Thomas thought it would unbalance them both. 

How to describe the joy of that kiss? The transcendent flood of happiness, the wave of desire that seemed to crash over Thomas anew, that had him clutching at James’s coat, at his collar. Earlier that evening James had kissed him back, shocked, slow, and tender; and while this was a cousin to that kiss, it had a redoubled effort on James’s part. _Quickly_ , it said, _quickly, take this, take it_.

But Thomas would not move quickly, would not give up this longed-for moment any sooner than he must. Besides, he could feel the tension in James’s body abating, kiss by following kiss. God, the warmth of James pressed close, of James’s tongue when Thomas opened his mouth around it. Thomas was considerably, and very quickly, aroused— but he was careful, careful.

When at last Thomas let his hands come to rest on James’s belt, and when slowly he began to unbuckle it, he met nothing in the way of resistance. He removed it. And when— one kiss more— he began to work open the falls of James’s breeches, he was met only by a press forwards. Briefly he stretched his palm out against James, could feel how hard he was, and— this was what Thomas had been desperate for, some confirmation, some proof, that James wanted Thomas anywhere near as badly as Thomas wanted him. The physical knowledge of it was dizzying.

Quick, breathless, he pulled out James’s prick. He held it in his hand, let his fingers test what it was like to do so. He kissed softly again at James’s mouth, and felt as well as heard the short, strangled noise that James made against his lips.

He wanted to— oh, he wanted a thousand things. He pulled his hand slowly along James’s hardening length, careful, precise. His mouth was at James’s cheek, and he said, “Shall we— will you sit?”

James would. He let himself be guided to the divan, and to be sat down upon it. When Thomas went to his knees before him, he opened his mouth as if he might— protest, encourage, Thomas was not sure, but no sound came out. His thigh, when Thomas rested his hand there, was tense.

At last James only said, in a tone uncustomarily uncertain: “Thomas.”

“It’s all right,” said Thomas. He rubbed absently at the material of James’s breeches with his thumb, watched the flush of his face. Then he said, a little unevenly, “Can I— ?”

James licked his lips and nodded. He watched with eyes very wide when Thomas took his prick back in hand, and then leaned forward to lick at its head. Again, and then again. Thomas felt the muscles of James’s stomach contract, beneath his clothing, heard the hitch of his breath; and then at last Thomas put his mouth around him, his tongue at the underside, his lips tight. James seemed almost to collapse into himself, his body tensing inwards towards the point where Thomas had possession of him, and he groaned quietly.

But James made very little noise thereafter, even when Thomas began to apply himself in earnest. All was quiet, aside from James’s breath coming gradually quicker, and the sound of Thomas’s own mouth moving over him. Thomas would have James make such a noise again, if he could; it had made his own neglected prick twitch in his breeches. But for now this was well enough, and Thomas had no wish to hurry. He closed his eyes, breathed in deeply through his nose, and allowed himself to accommodate to his position.

“Christ,” said James, very softly, “I can’t— ” but whatever he was about to say was cut off by a choked-off sound as Thomas relaxed his jaw and took him in as deeply as he knew how, brought them as close together as he could. James’s thighs tightened and quivered as he forced himself to be still, not to push his prick any further in, although Thomas did not think he would have minded very much if he had. Instead, Thomas began to move again, his mouth sliding in a slow, measured rhythm, his free hand still at James’s leg, his thumb rubbing small circles there. At some point came the answering sensation of James’s hand coming to rest on his head, the barely-there movement of his fingers against Thomas’s hair, curling against his scalp.

It was not very long before Thomas could tell that James was about to finish. He drew backward only slightly, so that James might come off in his mouth rather than down his throat: and he swallowed as James made a quiet, shocked noise under his breath and did so.

Thomas sat back, wiped the wet sides of his mouth with the back of his hand, and coughed once. Then he looked up. James’s posture had been quite undone. He was sprawled against the divan, his head tipped backwards, and one hand was across his eyes. His other hand, no longer upon Thomas’s head, rested by his side. After a moment, Thomas reached forward with his own hand and touched it, gently.

At this touch James jerked his raised hand away from his face, looking stricken. “Don’t,” he said, and so Thomas at once pulled away. But then James said, “I’m sorry. I only meant— I’m so sorry,” his voice hoarse and hollow, and it struck hard at something within Thomas’s too-open heart.

“There is nothing for which you must apologise,” Thomas said. 

Some measure of surprised disbelief, almost to the point of exasperation, crossed James’s face. It was unexpectedly and comfortingly familiar. 

As if suddenly noticing his own exposure— as if it were any more indecent now than at any point previously— James pulled at his half-unbuttoned tunic, his half-untucked shirt, hiding his softened prick in the folds of his clothes. Then, forcing himself to look Thomas in the eye, he said, at last, “Miranda— ”, but having got so far, he faltered.

Thomas was not sure whether James’s primary agony was his supposed betrayal of Thomas with Miranda, his new betrayal of Miranda with Thomas, or, indeed, a betrayal of some set of values that James had believed to be intrinsic to himself. But even now, James was reading Thomas’s face— unchanging, unsurprised, uncondemning— and in response, his own expression twisted into something more complicated.

He said, “You knew.”

“I did.” When James did not reply, Thomas continued, “I expect you have guessed that Miranda and I have— well, a mutually beneficial arrangement. There is very little that passes unknown between us.”

“It is beside the point,” James replied. There was something shuttered now behind his eyes, and when he spoke it was with an almost formal constraint. “My behaviour is not changed by it. The disrespect I have shown to you— “

“Tell me,” Thomas interrupted— and, surprised, James stopped speaking— “why did you take to Miranda’s bed?” When this met with a frozen silence, he added, a little more gently, “It is not a trick question. I assume that you desired her.”

After a pause, James said, somewhat uncomfortably, “Yes.”

“And I must assume that you also like her. You feel an accord with her and some affection towards her.”

“—Yes.” 

Thomas nodded. “Very well. So in your actions you expressed what it was that you felt. I do not consider such an expression of truth to be something one ought to apologise for.”

James’s mouth tightened a little. He breathed out very deeply, and looked Thomas up and down. Thomas, quite as comfortable engaging in debate as anything else on his knees, rested on his haunches and let him look, and eventually, James said, “You really believe that, don’t you?”

“Of course.” 

James nodded, slowly. Then he said, “Miranda didn’t tell me that you— ” but once again, he cut himself off, leaving Thomas to complete the thought as he chose. _Knew we were sleeping together. Sucked men’s cocks. Wanted me._

“No,” Thomas agreed. “You can appreciate the delicacy of our situation.”

There was another silence. But at the end of it, haltingly and with a very visible effort, James said, “I feel affection towards you. I— desire you.”

Thomas could not prevent himself from smiling. “I know,” he said, and knelt up, putting a hand at the nape of James’s neck; and James breathed out something like a sigh of relief before he kissed him once more.

*

The element of the affair with James that Thomas had least expected was its effect on his own relationship with Miranda. Being the first person to have passed between them in this way, James had inadvertently lent Thomas and Miranda an unprecedented new level of intimacy, one almost of sexual frisson, which rather fascinated Thomas once he had identified it. He was aware of a thread of intrigue that now stretched between them, curious and untested, which wrapped itself around otherwise ordinary conversation until neither of them could pretend not to know it was there. But while Thomas had little time for pretence, something held him back from wishing to discuss in the bluntest terms their shared experience.

“Are you being good to him?” Miranda asked, at last, some days later. It was playful, or it aimed to be.

Thomas said, “I am not sure I would know how to be anything else.”

Miranda’s smile then was entirely familiar. She opened her mouth as if she would say something more, and then seemed to think better of it. Then she seemed not to think better of it after all, and asked, “Have you had him fuck you?” 

“No,” said Thomas, after a moment. “Not yet.”

“Oh,” said Miranda. “Then you have that to look forward to.”

He did, immensely; and indeed he was not disappointed when the time came. James until then had been on all occasions of their lovemaking not in the least unenthusiastic, but rather— grateful, perhaps. It was as if all of this was something that was simply happening to him, for which he was extremely glad, and which he accepted willingly in whatever form Thomas might suggest. He looked often at Thomas in bed with a dazed, hungry kind of surprise that he should actually be there. Whatever it was that existed between them was still young and unnamed and a little careful, and Thomas sensed from James a reticence to question it, to push at its boundaries, lest it break entirely, or lest it be taken from him. But to interrogate the limits of a thing was all that Thomas knew how to do.

When at last Thomas asked him for his prick in his arse James seemed hesitant, and Thomas wondered at first if James’s previous intimacy with men had not encompassed the act. But when Thomas lay back on the bed, James knelt between his legs and regarded him for a moment with a particularly concentrated expression. Then he leaned forward and placed a splayed hand against Thomas’s chest, at his breastbone, holding him lightly in place, and bent his head to kiss him.

Something about the action, its deliberate carefulness, told Thomas that he was wrong; that James’s hesitation had not been that of inexperience. The extremely thorough fucking that James gave him shortly afterwards served to confirm this. It was entirely unlike the pliability that James usually assumed in bed, the wriggling, half-embarrassed flush of pleasure when Thomas touched him, or the languor of his sated body stretched out on the sheets. It left them both spent and exhausted, Thomas rather sore and glad of it, and James very quiet and hot at his side. He lay with his face buried in the crook of Thomas’s neck and shoulder, saying nothing, only breathing him in, while Thomas put a hand at the back of his head and stroked wonderingly at his hair.

Thomas longed to know everything of James— not only every inch of his body but of his soul— but this was very much easier said than done. To bare himself came to Thomas quite naturally, and now that this further door of intimacy had opened between them, he was hard pressed to find a part of his mind to which he did not wish James to be privy. He had a sense, however, that some parts of whatever existed within James were guarded not just against public access but against his own.

Of course in laying with Thomas James had cracked open one such fortress to them both, and Thomas pulled at the door inch by inch, attempting through gradual discovery of his sexual interests to throw a little accidental light on other matters. James, clearly well aware of his doing so, bore this with a mixture of good grace and well-managed deflection. For someone that Thomas had judged initially to be ambitious, James was surprisingly evasive on the subject of his future prospects, or indeed any kind of imagined future. When at last he responded in any meaningful way to the question of what, in that future, he might most want for himself, he said after a pause that it was only to serve England and her Navy in whatever way might be required of him.

“It has been my life and my making,” he said, simply, when Thomas, not particularly convinced, pressed him further. “I owe the Admiralty a debt that I can only hope to repay with my service.”

“I have never yet met a man whose desire was only to serve. I’m not sure I believe you are the exception.”

“My Lord— ” James began, which by now could generally be translated as a slightly caustic _Excuse me_.

“Surely you hope one day to command a ship?”

Yes, James eventually agreed: that would please him. He seemed fairly bemused, though not offended, by Thomas’s questioning on the matter, his own attitude towards his career presumably so self-evident to him that explaining or debating it was something he had not much considered.

Thomas, in turn, was genuinely surprised to discover quite how deep James’s adherence to the duties and hierarchies of his position seemed to run. Despite all the time he had spent in Thomas’s house— and indeed by now in Thomas’s bed— James could not, for example, entirely break the habit of standing to attention upon entering a room, one hand held stiffly behind his back, sometimes even when the room had only Thomas in it. Thomas took to readjusting James’s posture himself: he would take James’s hand from behind his back and kiss it politely on the knuckles, or place it, questioningly, somewhere impolite. This usually worked, and James would smile or shake him off, his gait loosened. But it was clear that he did not share Thomas’s implication that the behaviour was in some way ridiculous— only something that was part of a structure to which Thomas did not belong and that he could not hope to understand.

Meanwhile, the situation of James’s ongoing connection with the Hamiltons was much commented upon, but wrongly, and rumours of James and Miranda’s affair were rife as ever. James and Miranda, in fact, saw markedly little of each other for some weeks. Neither of them were forthcoming to Thomas on the subject, but there came eventually some repairing of the previous closeness between them. It was not unusual, upon returning to the house, for Thomas to be informed that the Lieutenant had arrived early for his appointment and was being entertained by Lady Hamilton. Entertained in every sense— their laughter was sometimes audible from the sitting-room— or sometimes he found them in low, private dialogue in the library. He quite often suspected that their conversation was about him, which made him very curious, but he never pressed them for it. He only took Miranda’s hand as she came to kiss him on the cheek and to ask about the day’s progress in the House, while James rose and nodded in greeting, a vestige of some unknown amusement on his face, upright and watchful on the other side of the room.

There was something not quite guarded, but— a protectiveness, from all three of them, toward the specific, delicate relationships that they now balanced. A protectiveness most especially against the world outside, but also, to a degree, against one another’s interference. There was a new, growing, particular place that Thomas and James inhabited, in which Miranda was not present, and likewise, Thomas and Miranda’s well-worn intimate shorthand did not entirely accommodate James. And so it was natural that there was still something, too, between James and Miranda to which Thomas was not privy, but it hugely intrigued him nonetheless. 

Thomas did not suppose that their initial physical attraction to one another had entirely dissipated, although he also knew that they no longer acted upon it. He was fairly sure that one or both of them would have told him if they had, and certainly he would have read such an event in the attitude of them both. “I wouldn’t mind,” he told James, once, in something of a misplaced attempt to encourage him to unfold the mysteries of this continued attachment. It had had the opposite effect, turning James prickly and awkward even as they lay side by side in Thomas’s bed, and it was, besides, not quite true. Oh, Thomas would have been able to bear it, he thought, but it would have been a different thing entirely for James to have been truly shared between them, and not an experience he was sure any of the three of them would enjoy. Still, he felt it had been right to be open-minded, even though he found he was relieved it was a door James seemed to wish firmly to close.

Thomas did, however, derive some obscure interest from eventually being permitted to visiting James’s boarding-house, not only because it was some extension of James himself, bare and temporary as it was, but also because Thomas knew that Miranda had been there before him. He supposed that he wanted to inhabit the passion that at that time had existed so fiercely between them; to see if any of it was caught, somehow, within the cold air of the room. The reality of both he and Miranda having lain with the same man in the same bed surfaced often enough in his thoughts when he was there. He had little doubt that James must think of the same thing. He wondered if James found he and his wife similar in any way. He wondered how similar they might both have found James. Whether James had watched Miranda undress with the same intoxicating focus with which he watched Thomas, whether he had kissed her with the same sudden, unleashed hunger. But well aware that it was a topic on which discussion would not be much welcomed, Thomas never asked.

Instead he asked other things. The room itself was small and empty, but between them he and James began to fill it with words, with the warm life of their conversation. Mock-debate and real debate, laughter and gentle teasing, stories that seemed for one reason or another worth telling. A visit Thomas had made to Rome when he was younger: a memory of the dawn sun rising over the columns of the Pantheon. James’s first voyage to the Americas, and the same sun setting in a fierce blaze over a sea so endless that one could imagine the rest of the world had simply fallen away from the edges of it.

The words of others, too, hung in the air around them. First the contents of James’s modest library, stacked close in a chest at the foot of his bed, and then of books that Thomas began to bring there with him precisely to this purpose. Shakespeare’s sonnets, St Augustine’s _Confessions_ , Hakluyt’s _Voyages_. Sometimes they read to test a question of some particular passage— Thomas enjoying, as always, the spectacle of James pulling apart an argument or idea with unassuming, merciless ease— but sometimes only to hear one another’s voices bring to life the long-dead. Homer, in Greek— James did not speak it, but he liked, he said, the shape of the language in Thomas’s mouth. Marcus Aurelius, in translation, James’s low, steady voice cradling the familiar words. 

Sometimes the effect was so soothing as to be almost soporific. One night, lying warm and comfortable among the bedclothes, James propped above him with the _Meditations_ resting on his knees, Thomas was lulled enough by the rhythm of it that his eyes drifted closed. James most likely thought him asleep, and when he stopped reading, Thomas assumed at first this was the cause of it. But when he opened his eyes, James was looking with some concentration not at him, but at the open book.

Thomas said, “Go on.”

James glanced at him, then looked back at the page. He read: “ _There is no present advantage in anything that may someday force you to break your word, or to lose respect for yourself, or to hate, suspect, or curse another, or to pretend to be other than what you are, or to lust after what you’d be afraid to seek openly_.” When he turned back to Thomas, he raised his eyebrows.

“Well,” said Thomas. “I would not suggest one ought to follow it to the letter.”

“Evidently,” said James. Then he continued: “ _The man who gives pride of place to reason and to his indwelling spirit— and remains the devoted servant of each— plays no parts, utters no complaints, and craves neither the wilderness nor the crowd. In fact, he lives without pursuing or fleeing anything at all._ ” At this, he stopped again, and then said, “Do you see an attraction in pursuing nothing?”

“No,” Thomas conceded.

“Though you also, I suppose, see no contradiction in serving both reason and one’s— ” he flicked his eyes back towards the page— “indwelling spirit.”

“That is true.”

James nodded, not so much in agreement as recognition of what he presumably expected to hear. “And what if they are incompatible?”

“I do not believe that we are made so.”

“No? Then who are the thieves, the drunks, the murderers? Does reason demand such actions of them? Or does their indwelling spirit leave their reason overwhelmed?”

“Or, perhaps, those are only the outcomes of unfortunate circumstances.”

“Which a good man’s reason may still hold at bay.”

“Although _in extremis_ , I imagine any one of the courses of action you suggest might be reasonable indeed.”

“Now you are only trying to be contentious,” said James, mildly. But he closed the book and reached down to lay it on the floor beside the bed.

Exactly how James regarded his own indwelling spirit Thomas had never quite ascertained, but certainly Thomas agreed with the emperor that it would do James some good to pay it more service. It was that same spirit, Thomas believed, that compelled James to lean down and kiss him once the book was dispensed with. Thomas arched very happily into it; and the kiss became slow and deep, James trailing a hand along Thomas’s chest, and Thomas reaching up to wind a hand into James’s hair, keeping him in place.

“You like having somebody to contend with,” Thomas said against his mouth, when they paused. James breathed out a huff of amusement, and did not argue, but only pulled Thomas closer. 

After a little longer the kiss began to have some intent behind it, although they had both been satisfied not long before. James began lazily to roll his hips against Thomas’s side, the muscles in his thighs flexing as Thomas’s hand ran along his leg, encouraging him.

“Thomas,” James murmured, and Thomas could not help but kiss him again— he loved still to hear James speak his name, when his voice was like this— but after only a few seconds, James broke it off. “Thomas, would you— ”

Here for a moment James paused. Thomas for his part did not widen his eyes, or hold his breath, or do anything at all to indicate that James making a request of him in bed was highly unusual, and that doing so demanded immediately his full attention. He only stayed quiet, and waited.

“I would like— ” said James, at length— and then he rolled over so that he lay on his back, manoeuvring Thomas with him, so that Thomas ended up braced above him. James drew one leg upwards, pulling Thomas closer still, making a space for him between his legs. His hands ran quite lightly, deliberately, over Thomas’s hips, and then he pulled them down towards his own, his half-hard prick nudging at Thomas’s belly as they met. _I would like you to fuck me_ , he didn’t say, not out loud, but wrote it instead across their bodies: his expression, pleading and serious, begged Thomas both to understand the suggestion and not to interrogate it.

For a moment they stayed just as they were, Thomas looking down at the places where they were pressed together, and then back at James’s face. Very gently, Thomas touched James’s hip-bone, with just the tips of his fingers. He traced them across James’s abdomen, along the inside of his thigh, and then, for the briefest moment, between his cheeks. James drew in a breath, but with quite a visible effort did not look away. 

Thomas wondered at him. James’s jaw was set, his eyes hard, colour high in his cheeks. That he wanted this Thomas did not doubt, and he did not quite think James was ashamed of wanting it, either: they had by now done and said far too much to each other for James to consider it humiliating to ask for Thomas inside him. Thomas considered, again, that they might have reached the limits of James’s prior experience. But he had been wrong about that the last time, and even if he were right, it would be unusual for James to be afraid of something because it was unknown to him. Certainly he would not be afraid of something because it might cause him pain. But Thomas was nonetheless keenly aware that James was afraid of something— and that like anything else he might fear, he had designed to meet it head on.

Thomas said, “If you want.”

James nodded. So Thomas leaned down and pressed a brief kiss to his forehead, and then pushed himself upwards and off the bed.

There was a small bottle of oil now kept habitually in one of the drawers of James’s writing-desk. Something about the familiar motion of the its retrieval, its incontrovertible reality and solidity in Thomas’s hand, tapped into the current of his own desire, held at bay while he had been examining James’s. His skin prickled at the thought of James taking him in, of the heat and the tightness of it, of James’s new expression of gritted-teeth pleasure. This was only increased when Thomas turned back and saw that James had rolled over onto his stomach, baring the smooth dip of his spine, the curve of his arse. Thomas had no particular desire for James to submit to him, but the sight of him laid out so entirely for the taking was singularly arresting.

James had pillowed his head on his folded arms, and was shifting to make himself more comfortable, but when Thomas knelt and placed a hand at the small of his back, he stilled at once. Thomas took his hand away again— but James said, “No, go on,” his voice muffled but steady, and so Thomas bent to place a kiss on the same patch of skin. James seemed to sink further into the bed, to settle there, under his mouth.

And so Thomas opened the bottle, and began, extremely carefully, to open James with his fingers. James had given a very hard intake of breath at the first touch, but had not tightened nearly as much as Thomas had expected. Indeed, he gave no indication of physical discomfort, but the press of his arousal grew gradually noticeable against the bed. Thomas found it difficult to tear his eyes away from the sight of it, of James’s hips moving minutely, and of Thomas’s fingers working slowly inside of him.

“James,” he murmured, eventually, “you’re very good at this.”

He felt James tighten around him, fleetingly, in response, but otherwise there was no reply— not even mumbled into the pillow, not even a wordless noise.

Thomas forced himself to look away from where his fingers were buried inside James. Instead, he took in James’s hunched, taut shoulders, his hands fisted tight in the bedding, his knuckles almost as pale as the sheets. It was as if all the tension had flooded to the opposite end of James’s body, holding him quite mute and motionless, even while he opened around Thomas without complaint.

Thomas in turn was flooded with a feeling that lay somewhere between guilt and tenderness. He felt that he had been very foolish. He withdrew his fingers entirely, and at this James at last did make a sound, small and surprised— but James had not fully raised his head before Thomas had made his way up the bed to lie again by his side. James turned to look at him, breathing slow and heavy through his nose, the effort of his stillness and his silence clear in the flush of his face, the brightness of his eyes. By God, he had a formidable will: but then so did Thomas.

“James,” Thomas said again, and leaned in to kiss him, hard and desperately loving. James let him, opening his mouth at once, wet and breathless. By degrees, Thomas tried to work it out of him, to soften his shoulders and loosen the grip of his hands.

“You do realise,” Thomas said, when he pulled away, James left open-mouthed and panting a little, “that there is no-one here but us. I am not sure if there is something you do not wish to be known. But I am the only one present to see it— and I already know you very well.”

James looked as though he might have something to say to this, but in the end he only swallowed, and dropped the angle of his chin.

“Would you like me to carry on?” Thomas asked.

“Yes,” said James, rough and quiet. “Please.”

Thomas nodded. He kissed him once more, soft and short this time, and then pushed himself to his knees.

When Thomas slid one finger easily back in, James only breathed out, quietly. But then Thomas put in two fingers again, a little deeper and a little harder, and this time James gave a very long, very low groan. It sounded as though it came through clenched teeth, and it was not so much a sound of pleasure as of— Thomas did not quite know what.

This noise had become soft and regular by the time Thomas put his prick inside him, although Thomas’s first real thrust punched a breathier, louder sound from James than he thought either of them expected. The walls were thin, the necessity for quiet something that had become rather part of the charm of spending time here— but even James, for the moment, seemed to struggle to give this consideration the appropriate care. They both paused, silent again, briefly motionless and unbearably tense, Thomas biting his tongue. Then Thomas leaned forward to where James’s hands now made loose fists in the bedding, and put his own hand over one of them. After a moment of hesitation, James opened his hand and let Thomas thread their fingers together.

To be afraid not of what he wanted, but of the wanting itself; to be frightened not that an act might make him weak, but might make him vulnerable, known, seen entirely: by God, Thomas loved him. He hoped James could feel it in the hard clasp of his hand, in the vigour and tenderness with which he now pushed into his body, but he panted it into James’s shoulder, whispered it into his ear, in case he could not. These proclamations were interrupted eventually by Thomas’s own climax, pulled from him with a small cry of pleasure. For a brief, joyful moment he did not know which parts of him were himself and which were James, whose skin was pressed to whose, whose body shook with release. But it was his: and when he could separate them again, James lay beneath him, his back sheened with sweat, his body shuddering. 

Thomas bent to kiss his shoulder. To his surprise, James at once rolled over and exposed himself entirely— exhausted, dazed, his prick rock-hard and leaking— and he reached for Thomas’s hand, brought very willingly there. When Thomas stroked him he groaned again, although by now it was almost a sob, aching and unrestrained. Then, at last: “ _Thomas_ ,” he bit out, choked on it— and that moment, the convulsion of James’s body, the heat of him spilling in Thomas’s hand, and Thomas’s name spilling from his lips, was better than anything Thomas could have imagined. A second climax, its pleasure greater even than the first, designed as it was to stimulate the parts of Thomas that he did not think could ever be sated.

*

“The Lieutenant will be sailing soon,” Miranda remarked, pouring tea.

“And a dull enough time we will have without him,” said Thomas. Certainly he did not need reminding of it. He looked forward with no great relish to the coming months of James’s absence, although he had some romantic notion of James at sea, feet planted wide to balance the roll of a ship, hair streaming in the wind, that he imagined would be a vague comfort. 

“You will miss him,” Miranda said. She set the teapot down.

“Of course.”

“As will I.”

Over the past months Miranda had not taken another lover, as Thomas had, selfishly, he supposed, hoped that she might. Not because he begrudged her continued intimacy with James, but because he felt that her doing so might in some way absolve him from— well. He could imagine James’s affront at being deemed something to be owned or traded, something that could be taken from one person by another.

Thomas said, “He will be back before we know it.”

“And you will wait for him.”

“Of course.”

“And the next time?”

“What do you mean?” 

“Will it just go on like this, do you think?” Miranda looked down at the tea in her cup, swilling it gently. “He is a sailor, Thomas; he will not stay. He could not stay if he wanted to.”

“Yes, I do know that.”

“So you will be— what, a sailor’s wife?” Miranda looked up at him again, and smiled, faintly. “I do not think you would be very good at it.”

Thomas smiled back, drank his tea, stretched out his hand, helpless. “I do not know what will happen. I have never known before.”

“I only want you to be careful.”

“You know that I am.” 

“I do not mean— ” Miranda paused, tapped her finger gently against the table-cloth. “I hope you are being careful of him.”

“Of James?”

She considered, and then said, “You do see, don’t you, how frightened he is of this— of you?”

Thomas looked at her in surprise. He said, “He is not afraid of me. He never has been. That was part of the appeal.”

“Well,” said Miranda, “then he is afraid of what you are doing to him.”

Thomas set his cup back into its saucer, with its delicate, musical chink. “I love him,” he said, after a moment. 

“I know.” Miranda closed her eyes, briefly. “I know, and— this is how you have always been, Thomas. You have so much heart to give, and you are so unafraid of giving it, and unafraid of what will happen when you do, over and over again. I adore you for it. But James— ” She exhaled carefully. “If anything should happen— ”

“What sort of anything?”

“I don’t _know_. But I do not think he knows what he has done with his heart, only that it has gone out from him; and he would not have the first idea how to go about getting it back.”

What must it be like, Thomas wondered, again, to have to watch them: for Miranda, who knew them both so well, so differently. He thought it must be quite unlike the time he had spent watching James and Miranda together, in the early days of their affair. He supposed Miranda could not have extricated herself from caring for either of them if she had tried to. He wondered if she had tried.

Thomas reached out and took her hand. His thumb ran gently over the rings on her fingers, over her smooth skin, as her hand tightened briefly around his. He said, “Yes, I will try to be careful.” And then, when she had let go: “What do you talk about when I am not there?”

The corner of Miranda’s mouth lifted just a little. “Certainly not this.”

James was due to call that afternoon. He had been informed of Peter’s latest proposal, which was that a slightly modified bill might be made to pass: one that extended a general pardon to the citizens of Nassau and the majority of its pirates, but not to a handful of its most notorious captains. It was these particular names, Peter believed, that were the sticking point in public opinion— Teach, Hornigold, Jennings— the figureheads of their campaigns of terror, infamous in the old and new worlds alike. To forgive these men would be to invalidate the accounts that had been given of them, to entirely undermine the public understanding of what could and could not be tolerated. The pacifying of an island’s worth of unknown petty criminals could be sold as an economic necessity. The demotion of these monsters to fallible men could not.

“The way I see it,” James said, leaning forward in his chair in the library, elbows braced on his knees— a posture that begged Thomas to listen to him— “it is a small concession, but one that could have an enormous impact on our prospects. It will be ten, twelve men at the very most. Hundreds still will be pardoned. Hundreds still could become the new people of the new Nassau. But if we do not agree to this, it is very probable that we will be struck down where we stand, and lose the chance to achieve any of it at all.”

Thomas sat back in his chair and pinched the bridge of his nose. Two glasses of wine sat untouched on the desk between them; they had been talking in circles for some time. James’s influence on him these past months had not been insignificant, and Thomas could see, and had been impressed by, the enormous amounts one could achieve if one was willing to compromise. And yet.

“It is not a small concession,” he said, looking at James again. “It is a serious one. The captains, the leaders, are integral to our plan, for precisely the reasons that Peter sets out. They are more than men— they are deliberate creations, they are stories, told by themselves and by their associates and third-hand by everyone else, until they are blown all out of proportion. And if the ending of those stories is defiance to the last, then the threat of piracy will not be truly extinguished. Those men will remain heroes in the eyes of their followers, for having faced death rather than betraying their way of life. Their names will live on and a resistance will form around them, even after they are hanged, and the pardoning of the rest of the island will be made extremely difficult by it.”

“Whereas your version of the plan— in which these most influential of men are somehow convinced indeed to betray their way of life, and to bring their crews with them, to boot— that, I suppose, will not be difficult at all.”

“Of course it will be difficult. But it can be done, if we can secure audiences with them. If we accept that they can be addressed as fellow, rational men. I am sure it is true that they are the fiercest, bloodiest and most ruthless of their peers, but that is not all they are. They will be the cleverest, too, and the ones given to strategic thought. And so if they can be made to see the benefits of our proposal, they will not be able to dismiss it out of hand.”

“All of which would be well and good if we stood any chance of _getting_ you to Nassau to take tea with these fellow, rational men. And that is what Peter is offering us.”

“Getting _me_ to Nassau?” said Thomas.

“Who else do you imagine is going to talk them into it?”

Thomas half-smiled, but said, “It is not worth the sacrifice. Without a universal pardon, the plan fails.”

James dropped his head forward, almost resting it on his hands. “Christ,” he said, when he looked up again. “It is very difficult to make progress, Thomas, if one is simply hitting one’s head against a brick wall.”

“And which one of us is doing that?”

“Has anybody ever told you, my Lord, that you can be extremely frustrating?”

“More people than you might expect.”

James shook his head, his mouth only twitching, and reached forward to take a drink from his glass. “You do not give an inch,” he observed, setting it down again. 

“No,” Thomas agreed. “Not in this. You would be disappointed in me if I did.”

James sighed, and stretched out in his wooden chair. “I most certainly would not. I would be enormously relieved.”

“I am not sure I agree.”

“Naturally.”

“Well, if you did not enjoy arguing with me,” Thomas said, “you would not have suffered doing so for so long. You would be entirely more forceful in your own part, or you would simply take up the practice of distracting me, in an attempt to take your inch.”

“Do you think me such an unworthy opponent?”

“Quite the opposite.”

“I do not find that you are easily distracted.”

“Then you have not been trying.”

James did smile, then, that wry, involuntary thing. “No?”

“You cannot expect always to win in so straightforward a manner.”

James gestured rather helplessly, shaking his head, at Thomas. “I don’t always expect to win.”

Thomas grinned at him, and said, “Why not?” 

For a moment James looked as though he might have some retort, but if he did, he swallowed it back. Instead, he considered Thomas in some detail— a practice Thomas found enjoyable enough— and then, seeming to come to a decision, James rose to his feet, pushing his chair backwards. Then he braced his hands on the desk before him, his hands on either side of the pile of papers between them, and leaned down.

James looked— formidable, from this angle, an ability of the precision with which he held his body that he did not much use, or at least not in Thomas’s presence. Thomas found himself wondering fleetingly what it would be like to fight him, hand to hand. It was something so far outside both Thomas’s interests and his abilities that he had not previously considered the idea, despite the fairly obvious parallels with their physical intimacy. The word that came to mind in response to it now, rather inappropriately, was _exhilarating_.

“Which course of action is this, then?” Thomas murmured. “Distraction or force?”

James didn’t answer, but he lifted one hand from the desk and shaped it, for a moment, around Thomas’s face. He ran it lightly through the short, wig-flattened length of Thomas’s hair, pushing it up, and he moved it down to feel the outline of Thomas’s cheek, the bone and the soft hollow of skin. James’s thumb just in front of Thomas’s mouth was very gentle, and Thomas leaned into the touch. Then James dipped his head down and kissed him, warm and insistent. It was intolerably good: the immediacy of it, the thoroughness.

Eventually Thomas pulled away, though for just long enough to say, a little breathlessly, “Close the curtains.”

James left him and did so. It made the room dim and musty, with patterns of slanting brightness falling across the floor and the desk and the books, from where the afternoon sunlight still came in through the cracks.

When James returned, Thomas had pushed his own chair out from under the table, and had begun with one hand to loosen his neckcloth— but James took his hand and pulled him to his feet. Another kiss, this one briefer. Then James was guiding him to turn around, crowding him backwards. He put his hand to the back of Thomas’s thigh, and, without very much effort, shifted him bodily to sit on the edge of the desk.

Thomas hummed in abrupt, surprised pleasure. James, meanwhile, was finishing the job of removing Thomas’s neckcloth for him. His warm fingers skimmed over the skin near Thomas’s collar as he untied it, discarded it— and then all at once his fingers were replaced by his mouth, his tongue, kissing slowly, deliberately, at Thomas’s neck.

Thomas submitted to it: to the sensation, to the position in which James had wished to place him, to the inevitable swell, already, of his own prick. He pushed the heel of his hand against it, through his breeches— _God_ , as James ran his tongue over the jumping pulse in his neck— but then James noticed, and caught up his hand, and said, “Wait.”

This— not a suggestion, not a request, but quite naturally and quite emphatically an instruction— had an effect on Thomas that did not entirely surprise him. It was a brief, tight, shiver of arousal, as James held him still, and he gasped just a little, pleased and open-mouthed. James glanced at his face, sharp and interested, but not, Thomas thought, surprised. _Oh_ , Thomas thought, _he has been holding back on me_ ; but he could not in the moment bring himself to even the faintest annoyance. Not as James busied himself opening Thomas’s waistcoat, untucking his shirt, slow but steady.

At last James’s fingers came to the fastenings of Thomas’s breeches, and then he was sliding his hand inside, bringing Thomas’s cock out into the open. He held it for a moment, let it fit into the palm of his hand, let Thomas make a low, hopeful noise. But then almost at once he let go, left it curving upward out of Thomas’s breeches, and his hand came back to Thomas’s face.

James’s eyes were very dark as his thumb rested once more against Thomas’s bottom lip, and it took only the slightest push for Thomas to open his mouth. James nudged his thumb inside, and pressed lightly, testing, against the flat of Thomas’s tongue. Thomas moved his mouth over him, willingly, unquestioning, and James watched intently as he did it. Then he drew out his thumb, and let Thomas press his open mouth to the palm of his hand, to lick across it, kiss wetly at its warm, firm expanse.

When James reached down again between them both, he slid his hand without preamble around Thomas’s waiting prick— and then, the curve of a smile at his mouth, he put his other hand at the back of Thomas’s head, moved even further forward into the gap between Thomas’s legs, and kissed him again, deeply, as he began a slow, inexorable pull.

Thomas, hot all over, his shirt clinging, made rather an indecent noise into James’s mouth. For the moment he could not think of anything past the overwhelming sensation of it, the twin sensations of James’s firm tongue and his firm hand, both in their steady rhythm. But eventually Thomas reached forward until he found the seam of James’s breeches. He rubbed his knuckles there vaguely, wanting to feel James’s hardness, wanting James to bring them both off together, or push Thomas to his knees and—

“No,” said James, against his mouth, “Leave it, I’m going to— ”

But at this point he had brought his hand upwards to the head of Thomas’s cock, and loosening the grip of his fingers, he moved his palm in a circular motion across its tip— and Thomas shuddered and said, “Oh, that’s— ” and somewhat lost his train of thought. James did this again, and then again, until Thomas said, “ _Oh_ , don’t, or I’ll— ”

“Rather the point, isn’t it,” James murmured. But he demurred, and indeed with one final, lingering pull, he took his hand away completely.

Thomas closed his eyes, tipped his head backwards, and caught his breath. He braced his hands by his sides, at the desk’s edge, attempting to regain some shred of composure. But he could hear the sound of James’s belt coming unbuckled, and so he opened his eyes again. James was opening his own breeches, attending for a moment to his own cock, which was filling, stiffening, as he pulled at it once or twice with a loose fist. Thomas could not look away from the movement, from its easy carelessness.

“You could take me,” Thomas said, words coming quickly, his own cock twitching again, “here, if you wanted, we could— ”

James’s eyes glinted, and the corner of his mouth lifted, but he said, “No, I just want to make you— ” And then he was coming back into the space between Thomas’s spread thighs, pushing his prick up against Thomas’s, wrapping his still-slick hand around them both together.

Thomas shuddered, delighted. His hips pushed up as best they could from the table’s edge, pressing into the sensation, into the friction of James’s grip, almost but not quite tight enough. He brought his arms up to loop around James’s shoulders, and James turned his head downward, kissing him once again. But Thomas had to break away from his mouth to watch his hand, the steady, determined motion of it. God, the hot press of James’s arousal against his own, the closeness of him in his arms, his absolute focus on what he was doing: they all made Thomas groan, suddenly, shockingly close to his end. He bit his lip, closed his eyes once more. But then James was saying, next to his ear, “Yes, now, I want you to,” as he pushed up against him once more— and Thomas came, shaking, messy, gasping. _Here, take it, take it_.

Thomas stayed as he was, his arms resting on James’s shoulders, fingers brushing gently at his hairline, after he was done. He pressed his forehead to James’s and watched as he brought himself off— his hand much faster now, rough and relentless, made even more hot and slippery where Thomas had spilled into it. His release came quickly, over the desk and Thomas’s spent cock and Thomas’s untucked shirt.

For a moment longer they did not move. Indeed Thomas thought he could have stayed exactly like this, James trapped in his arms, and never had cause to move again. But then, clearing his throat, James broke gently free of him. He stood back and regarded what he had made of Thomas. He looked fairly satisfied with it.

In return, Thomas smiled. “A very valiant effort,” he said, and watched James’s eyes flicker into attention. “Well-strategised and even better executed. But not quite enough, I am afraid. I am currently no less disposed to accept Peter’s proposal as it stands.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Thomas,” James said, briefly and entirely without a guard on his mouth, and at the sheer surprise of it Thomas laughed aloud. He pushed himself to his feet, where he caught James in a slow, thorough, honest kiss, and thought: I will not let this man go; he will not be taken from me; it is a thing that simply cannot be permitted to happen.

 


	3. Chapter 3

  **iii.**

At the stern rail, James was left alone. Captain Reynolds had long given up attempts at polite conversation, and few others onboard deemed it appropriate to speak to him, or perhaps they simply did not care to. Certainly James did not encourage it. Eyes slitted against the sun, he stood for a long time in silence, watching the wake stretch out behind them. They were flying this afternoon: nine, ten knots, perhaps. Soon enough a man would be here to heave the log and tell him so, or rather to steadfastly ignore him as he did it. 

The element of this voyage that James had not foreseen, had not for even a moment considered, was that he would be required to make it as a passenger. The idea was so far outside his understanding that it had simply not crossed his mind. But the _Lavinia_ was a merchantman, and she had a full complement of hands. Of course he could not simply assume an office. The stupidity of it. Very well: they had paid their passage, and passengers they were. But to be at sea and not to work was an experience so entirely foreign to him that he did not at all know what to do with it.

After only a few days, James had gone to Captain Reynolds and begged that he might rate him able seaman John Smith and be done with it. He had spent the first four years of his naval career before the mast, and could do it again. Happily, in fact— he longed not for responsibility but simply for labour, for a physical exhaustion that might deaden his mind. But the captain would not hear of it. A gentleman in the forecastle, and a friend of Lord Ashe? James protested, but Reynolds would not budge. Besides, the captain said, what of the lady? Even if Reynolds were to agree to this notion, which he would not, it would not be possible to eat and sleep among the men while continuing to associate with Mrs Barlow. It would cause great unrest aboard the ship to see the natural order of things so upset. Surely, Reynolds insisted, not unkindly, if the gentleman was indeed a seaman, this must be evident to him.

James considered agreeing to these terms. He considered explaining to the captain that he would welcome the denial of Miranda’s company, and an excuse to put an end to the tense, grief-filled hours they spent together. But even in the hot snap of his irritation, James knew this would be exceedingly foolish. He instead conceded to Reynolds, who was much relieved.

So he had been left, then, a restless and silent figure, prowling the decks. He had never known a ship so constricting, although he had sailed in smaller, nor a journey so interminable, although he had sailed for far longer. He avoided where possible dining with Reynolds, whom even from within the depths of his own misery James managed to find excruciatingly dull. He was avoided in turn by the crew, among whom he now moved almost entirely unnoticed, a wrathful but distant ghost.

He had begun to avoid Miranda, too, although doing so left him feeling dry and hollowed-out, battered from within by the sheer weight of his unhappiness. In the panic of events that had followed Thomas’s arrest, James had made a very crucial error: he had followed the lesson he had learned over the previous nine months, and listened to the Hamiltons. Miranda had begged him to flee— had pressed him with Thomas’s charge that above all, the two of them should take care of one another— and unthinkingly, unthinkably, he had done it.

His hands on the rail were gripped hard, almost cramped. He made a conscious effort to let go, to work at the stiffness, to rest them more comfortably— but it felt false to do so, as if he were attempting to let go of the fury, the impotence, the sick-making shame of his flight. Christ, let his fucking hands hurt. Let all of him hurt: he longed for a fight, something to mirror in blood and bruises on his skin the mess he had made of his insides.

Greater even than the desire to feel some physical pain, however, was the urge to do violence, which was immense. James thought daily— hourly, even— about visiting such an urge upon Alfred Hamilton. He had a strange fantasy that he would find the Earl in Nassau upon their arrival, inexplicably there, inexplicably ahead of them: that he would root him out and put a pistol to his heart, or throw him to the pirates and see him hanged in the streets. Or, sometimes, he entertained the idea that in Hennessy’s office he might have drawn his sword and simply run the Earl through on the spot. A ridiculous notion, but as much as any thought could provide such a thing, it brought him some short-lived satisfaction.

The satisfaction was interrupted, usually, by Thomas. Not Thomas as he now must be, not in dirt and irons, but appearing at James’s elbow in a most commonplace manner. _Yes, that is all very well—_ a casual, elegant gesture that encompassed and rather dismissed the fantastical murder of his father— _but oughtn’t you to look at things more broadly?_

Yes, he ought to. There was much reparation to be made.

Six bells. At length, James turned from the rail before the log could be heaved, moved past the man who had come to do it, and went down onto the quarterdeck. There he stood for a time near the ladder, not crossing to the chair where Miranda sat reading, a parasol shading her from the sun. Nonetheless, eventually, feeling his eyes on her, she looked up. Her expression was unchanging as she regarded him.

Two nights past, sleepless in his cabin— his own cabin, an unasked-for and unsettling privacy— James had risen in a frantic restlessness, pulled the lid from his sea-chest, and all but emptied it onto the floor. Folded at the bottom of the chest was his uniform coat. Why he had brought it with him he did not know, and he did not particularly remember deciding to do so. The coat hung limp and unassuming in his hands when he shook it out, and after a moment, he balled it up, stalked from the cabin, and went on deck, where he wrapped the coat around a twelve-pound shot and threw it overboard. Understandably somewhat surprised, the officer of the watch began to approach him, but when James turned from the rail, the man only paused, nodded, and walked away. Even in his breathless, drifting fury, James had felt some obscure gratification: in both the consignment of something to the sea, and in the man’s wordless retreat at the sight of him.

Turning back to the water, James had watched as the last of the ripples from his projectile faded away, until the place was lost entirely in the darkness. He began to feel a little embarrassed at how literal and dramatic the gesture had been. _A good coat_ , Thomas would have chided. James thought, though not in any real sort of way, about following it over the rail. More as an exercise of imagination, of what it would mean to bury one’s entire self in the ocean, of how and where and whether one would emerge again. It brought half to mind a story that he could not fully recall, nudging at the edges of his memory. A man born from the sea. He stared out at the cold, black churn of the water, and thought: not likely.

Now, laying down her book, Miranda rose and crossed the deck to join him in the heat of the afternoon’s sunlight. He had become so used to the business of the ship parting unthinkingly around him that it was a faint surprise to be seen, recognised, directly approached.

Miranda took her place by his side without comment, and stood for a time looking out at the white-headed water whipping past them. James faced inwards, leaning back upon the rail, his arms folded, until the silence began to be oppressive.

“We will raise Boston in a week, with this wind,” he said. Miranda looked up at the sound of his voice. “Maybe less.”

“I had not expected it to be so soon.” 

“Then a few days, a week at most, before we can find passage to New Providence. And then— I imagine that Nassau will be in some disorder. The state in which I saw it last was, I think, only the beginning.” 

“How long will a ship stand in the bay there, do you think? Perhaps we ought to leave what we can on board, if only for a night or two, until we have found at least a temporary accommodation.”

James nodded, and said, “I think perhaps you should remain on the ship for the same period.”

At this Miranda turned entirely from the rail, frowning. “Certainly not.” And when this received no response: “James. I am not some silly girl.”

“I am not suggesting it because I think Nassau might offend your sensibilities. I am suggesting it because I think Nassau poses a very real danger of assault, robbery and death.” 

“Oh, well.” Miranda raised her eyebrows, and leaned backwards, her posture mirroring his. “Of course.”

“I am being serious.”

“I know very well that you are.” They stood for a short time in further silence, side by side, until Miranda said, “And we are still to tame this place, are we?”

James turned once more to the sea. He said, “We are to make it ours.”

That night James went for the first time in days to Miranda’s cabin. It was a little bigger than his own, and a little brighter during the day, but still a sort of confinement, a packed-in space containing all the parts of herself that she had been able to bring with her. She offered him tea from a tin on the shelf by the window, which he declined, and then wine, which he declined also.

“When we arrive,” he said, instead, “We ought to look for somewhere to stay in the interior of the island, among the farmers. Not in Nassau town.”

“All right,” Miranda said, slowly.

“Somewhere out of the public eye. We are well ahead of gossip at the moment, and Nassau has plenty of its own, but the story will reach even this far, eventually. By the time it does, we must make sure it is impossible to attach to either one of us.”

“All right,” Miranda said, again.

“Because when we return to England, when it’s safe— ” 

“When it’s _safe_?” Miranda interrupted. “When do you imagine it’s going to be safe? Do you think the Earl will forget this?” 

“Safer, then. When we have been gone for long enough that his guard is down. And when we return it must be entirely unnoticed. Nobody can suspect that we are people with any reason to visit England that is not entirely unremarkable.”

“James.”

“It might be as short as a few months; it might take a year. And then— ”

“James, we’re not going back.”

“Very well,” James said, aware that his voice was becoming shorter, terser, “I will return, and you can await us in— Boston, or Philadelphia, or wherever you see fit.”

Miranda was shaking her head. She looked desperately, profoundly unhappy, more so that James could remember having seen her at any other point on this interminable, unreal journey. “You must listen to me. We can’t go back to London. _You_ can’t go back to London. There was danger enough before this, and now— ”

“ _Nassau_ is dangerous. London is not dangerous. If you think we can survive for any length of time here, I do not understand why you think we cannot return there.”

“At the moment,” said Miranda, her voice sharp, “only one of those places holds a significant threat of your being hanged.”

James could feel his throat begin to constrict around that raw, hot thing that seemed always an inch away, now, from breaking the surface, from coming up like bile, in an explosion of words or force. “God damn it,” he bit out, “What does that matter, how can it matter, when Thomas is— is still— ”

“I told you, he wanted us to go. He begged us to go. It was the last thing he asked of me before they took him— how can you think of doing the opposite?”

James closed his eyes. His blood was thumping, his ears ringing, as if they were in the middle of a broadside. “I should not have listened to you. I should not have listened to either of you.”

“So I ought to have allowed you both be be taken from me, is that what you are saying?” Miranda’s voice was growing angry, her face tight and pale. “I should have let you walk freely into your own arrest, most probably your own death— ”

“Yes!” The volume of James’s own words came distantly as a surprise to him, as if he was at once both taking part in this argument and watching it from very far away. It was as if the fury and anguish themselves had found a voice quite separate from his own. “ _Yes_ , you should have allowed me the dignity of _fighting_ —  ”

“I am not interested in your dignity; I am interested in your _safety_ — ”

“But not in his?” James’s breath was coming short and fast. It seemed to scrape at the insides of his mouth. “You would leave him there to rot— and you say that you _love_ him— “

A sharp crack, and an impact that for a split-second James could not translate. Miranda had hit him hard against the side of his face. Surprised momentarily into silence, he stared at her. Her hand was still raised, her face flushed, her eyes wide and furious. For a moment, it seemed she could not master herself even to speak. But then, her voice a tense quiver, she said, “If you knew one-tenth of what I felt for Thomas— “

Pain was blooming slowly across James’s numbed cheek. It anchored him, spurred him on. “Then what, I would understand? I do not think so.”

“No,” she said. “No, I do not think you could.”

James found that his body was shaking. He could not have named the emotion that was driving it. Dangerous, to let it out like this, whatever it might be. Something that he could not previously have trusted himself to control, and now— he did not even know what form it might be capable of taking.

When he took hold of Miranda by the arms it was not to hurt her, although it might on some level have been intended to frighten her. Only it did not do so. Instead of flinching away she moved closer, pulling them together, her body impacting on his with surprising force. She wrapped her arms around his neck and shoulders, and he gathered her up and held her very tightly. The silk of her dress slipped under his hands, the terribly familiar scent of her hair in his nose. 

He fucked her against the bowed wall of the cabin, ruthless and unforgiving. Her hands were tangled in his hair, her nails digging into his scalp. She had enjoyed such treatment, once, but this was far from being for her benefit, or indeed for his. It was a kind of very desperate communion, although afterwards James did not think that they had reached any further understanding. Still, they clung to one another, Miranda’s breath hot and shuddering beside him, James’s face buried in her neck, until he began to weep. Freshly enraged by doing so, he broke apart from her and stormed from the cabin.

On deck the cold night air hit him hard. He dragged a sleeve across his face and moved without much thought to his place by the stern rail, the life of the ship continuing unabated around him. There he closed his eyes and stood for a while motionless, his blood and his body cooling.

Take care of one another, Thomas had demanded of them; what would he think, if he knew how quickly it had come to this? James was forced to concede that Thomas would probably have found it quite amusing. And oh, how like Thomas, the blithe assumption of his rightness, of his grasp of a situation above anyone else’s. That he might bid them run and know they would do it, because he thought it best. James felt the rise of his anger once again in the back of his throat. Lord, that Thomas might be here to bear that anger in person.

Only he had never, really, been angry with Thomas. Thomas was exceptionally difficult to be angry with. He was more than capable of provoking exasperation, impatience, frustration— but even then, always with that infernal glint in his eye, the bend at the corner of his mouth that said: _this is all a game, we are only playing_. And yet at the same time one truly believed that Thomas meant every word he said. How both of those things could be the case at the same time James had never quite understood.

James had been able quite easily to make sense of what existed between himself and Miranda, even after, or perhaps especially after, they began sleeping together. The rules of their relationship were clearly delineated, its status as a satellite of the Hamiltons’ marriage unarguable, its balance of reward and complication carefully weighed. He understood the world well enough to know that that one might exchange some degree of self-worth, of moral certainty, for the pleasures of another person’s body and their company— and Miranda’s body and company were, he had thought, worth much. Worth jeopardising both his professional conduct and Thomas’s trust? Yes, he must have decided, although sometimes he thought that parts of his mind decided things to which other parts had not even been privy. And so he and Miranda had been able to light the flame between them, to keep it covered, allowing it just enough air to burn.

But what, then, was he expected to have made of Thomas? Thomas, for whom there were no half-measures, who saw no benefit or interest in the withholding of anything. Thomas who woke, and kissed him; who took his coffee, and kissed him, mouth hot with it; who stopped him at the door, eyes raking over his uniform, and kissed him, as if seeing him anew. James was not sure he had been built with the space to house such a quantity of open affection. He had not known where to put it, where to keep it. He had worried that it would run through his fingers, like sand; that one day, all of a sudden, its supply would be cut off and he would have to survive on what little of it had been caught in his hands, lodged in the lines of his palms. 

When James had last made this same voyage, not so many months past, he had written to Thomas and Miranda both. The letters had travelled back on a packet from Boston, and then he had sent more on a returning ship from New Providence itself. He felt that he had some obligation to do so, and he had nobody else to write to. But the blank expanse of the pages had seemed to him impossibly difficult to navigate. He found himself blockaded not only by the necessity for propriety, but also by simply not being able to access a language for whatever it was he had to say. And so in the end the letters had been sparse, formal and factual, little more than a log-book account of the journey so far and an estimated date of its completion. _Yr humble servant, Jas McGraw._

On the night he returned to London, James had found the letters he had written to Thomas slipped inside a volume of Plato’s dialogues, on Thomas’s bedside table. He had turned them over in his hands. Thomas had been dozing at his side, and so James had been saved from having to know what to say then, in person, too.

Four bells struck in the first watch. Softly, through the darkness, came the sentinels’ refrain, echoing from their positions: _All’s well, all’s well, all’s well_. James hung his head.

After a time he heard Miranda’s light, familiar tread. He looked around as she came to stand beside him, the breeze ruffling her hair, tied loosely back. 

“I’m sorry— ” he began, and she shook her head, but once he had said it he found it difficult to stop. “I’m sorry, Miranda, I didn’t mean— ”

“Don’t lie to me,” she said, quietly. “That’s one thing you can do.”

“No,” he said, and swallowed. “I only mean— I do know that you love him.”

Miranda nodded, and closed her eyes. He felt that the presence of her, the line of warmth at his side, was the only real thing on this ship, perhaps in this ocean. He could not bear to move away from it.

“What I don’t understand,” said James, slowly, “is why Thomas, and not me.” He looked away, at the dark, vast emptiness of the sea and the sky. “His own son.”

Miranda said, “Thomas’s father does not much like him.”

“I doubt he much likes me.”

“I doubt he feels anything towards you,” Miranda said. “I think you are entirely beneath his notice, as, for the most part, am I. But Thomas… Thomas is a disappointment. He always has been. And now, at last, there is the opportunity to teach him a hard lesson.”

James did not reply, for a little while. He only thought again, as he tried so very hard not to do, of Thomas in Bedlam, of the inexpressible wrongness of the image. James would, he thought, have endured a thousand imprisonments, beatings, humiliations in his place— would have done so gladly, in return for what Thomas had given him. Thomas was not a particularly soft man, would not likely buckle all at once, but in physical hardship he was necessarily unpractised. James wondered if they had bound his hands. He fought down the urge to be sick.

“I would kill Alfred Hamilton,” he said. His voice was surprisingly dispassionate, and he recognised that it was not so much a release of emotion as a statement of fact.

Miranda’s arm came gently through his, linking them together. He expected that she might try to calm him, steady him. But then she said, her soft voice very clear in the dark, “Yes, I know.”

*

 Nassau was in parts as he had remembered it. The beating sun, the dust in his eyes, the mood of unruly possibility. But what had been a simmering air of unrest had become an open chaos. The pirates might have overrun the town, but they had not done it in any sort of strategised way, and the place was not so much under new rule as apparently under none at all.

There was mass drunkenness on the beach. Shouting, scuffles, minor territory wars. Men were encamped roughly in their crews, flags hoisted over their makeshift tents and lean-tos and cook-fires. Black flags, openly, and many variants of them. There was a febrile kind of excitement in the atmosphere, either at the idea that such instability might simply build into an unprecedented level of pandemonium— or that whatever the new law of Nassau would be, whoever would emerge its tyrant king, had not yet been established.

James did not think he was particularly likely to be recognised. Indeed, looking into a shaving-glass before he had disembarked from the sloop in which they had arrived, he had for a moment not recognised himself. His hair was unkempt, his eyes cold, the lines of his mouth and brow hard. But the last time he was here he had been in uniform, and it would not do to take chances. Of course there were a good number of men on this island who had once been in the Navy, some deserters, some mutineers, but he did not particularly care to be mistaken for either. There was the third group of men who washed up on shores like these: outcasts. Removed forcibly from civilisation, rather than having turned their own backs upon it. No choice in the matter. The only choice remaining was what to do now that one was here.

James paid attention to the way he walked, the way he held himself. Not stiff, not military, but not entirely invisible, either. This town was too small for it. In order to survive he must be a man worth regarding. He found that the gait fitted fairly easily. Strong and straight, some lingering trace of the lieutenant on duty, but looser, and a little more forceful. It took him all the way along the beach, into the town, without particular comment or notice. Self-important men walked like this all over Nassau.

It was early evening, and he had some idea of investigating what might still pass here for a land agent, or at least finding an inn in which it would be possible to board with Miranda for longer than a night. She had acquiesced at last to being left for now on the sloop, which would be anchored in the bay for two days at least, but the sooner he could bring her somewhere safer, the better.

The first inn he came to was most certainly not suitable, even by the standards to which he expected Miranda must be prepared to lower herself. Inside, he could feel in the thick, ale-saturated air the volatile tension of the place, like being among a pack of liberty-men so charged with pent-up energy that one could almost taste the impending brawl. He thought of asking at the bar whether any boarding-houses were still in operation, but then decided against marking himself out as a newcomer quite so immediately. But perhaps he should buy a drink: the place might not do in the long term, but it rather suited his present mood, and he might pick up some information while he was here. 

It was while he was making this decision that James realised that he was being watched. A number of heads had turned when he had first entered the room, but one man at the bar, it seemed, had fixed his gaze upon him more deliberately. James’s eyes flickered over him in turn, as briefly as possible. He didn’t recognise the man— wiry, dirty, hand curled around his tankard. But his interest was unmistakeable hostile, curling out towards James across the dusty floor, poking uncomfortably beneath his collar.

It was very possible that this was the way this man looked at anyone he didn’t know, that this was simply James being identified, with open distaste, as a stranger. But there was an outside chance, James supposed, that he might look familiar. It might not really matter either way. Certainly, whichever was the case, the most sensible thing to do would be to turn around and leave.

James approached the bar. He rested his elbows on its wooden top and leaned against it, letting the man’s stare burn a hole in the side of his face, even as James looked straight ahead, at the bottles and glasses on the shelves. He waited, but not for long, until the man’s voice said, “Who the fuck are you, then?”

James turned to face him. The man’s lip had curled, his eyes narrowed. James did not know him, and he was becoming increasingly convinced that neither did he know James. But other people were looking now. This was the sort of place, James could tell, where a fight was a spectator sport. He could feel himself being sized up.

What James could also feel, as he pushed himself to his full height, was a kind of freeness welling up inside him. It was a good feeling, one that rippled easily through his body. It was a little like being suddenly drunk on very strong spirits, or lying in fogged contentment in Thomas’s bed, moments after finding release. The rest of his mind, the rest of the world, did not encroach on it. How funny, he thought, that this man could not possibly know who he was, or what he had been wanting to do more than anything, these past weeks. 

So he answered: “Who the fuck wants to know?”

“I beg your pardon?” the man said, although he sounded as if he was begging anything but. He had been sitting on a barstool, and now he, too, pushed himself to his feet. When James didn’t reply, he leaned in, his breath hot and close and sour. “I don’t know who the fuck you are. I don’t know what the fuck you’re doing here. And I don’t take kindly to strangers, who could be anyone, who don’t explain themselves.”

James said, levelly, “That’s a shame. Shall we try again?” 

The sneer the man had been wearing on his lips turned into an unfriendly, twisted smile, and he said, “Who— the fuck— are you?” 

“Who the fuck,” said James, louder this time, “wants to know?”

The man lunged for him. James could already see where he was going to swing from, and blocked it, catching his wrist— but he was shoved backwards, half-into the bar. The man didn’t have much bulk, but he was a ready enough fighter, and while James was briefly immobilised, he landed a good, hard punch to James’s jaw. 

The taste of blood in James’s mouth, as they grappled, was familiar, welcome. There was some small degree of commotion around them, although nobody stepped in. It didn’t last long, anyhow. James kneed the man in the gut, quick and vicious, and used the breathing space to hit him in the jaw in return. Then again, and again, until the man was bleeding from the nose and mouth. He still managed to deliver a blow to James’s belly, momentarily winding him, and then one that glanced James’s temple. But by then James had got a grip on the man’s hair, and without much difficulty he wrenched his head down. It bounced off the rough wood of the bar, and then James had him pinned there, one arm twisted up and back behind him. He held him down.

A moment of stillness, of the sound of thick, hard, breathing, and then James let his opponent go. The man spat blood onto the bar-top, and then, standing only a little shakily, he spat at James’s feet. 

James turned and walked towards the door. His body was thrumming, singing with relief. He was dimly aware that he was still being watched, that there was a murmuring attention in the room, but also that people were settling once again, now it was all over. That this had been something of interest, but nothing so extraordinarily special.

He was about to push open the door and walk outside when he felt something drip into his eye. He wiped it away. A a cut above his eyebrow, from one of the rings on the man’s fingers. He glanced, for a moment, at the blood that came away on his hand. When he looked up again, his eyes met that of another man sat at a table by the door.

James’s breath was still coming heavy, and before he’d realised it, he’d half-clenched his fists again. But this man stayed seated; he was watching him with a keen interest, but a markedly less violent one. James stretched his fingers back out, and let him look.

“What?” James said, eventually. He swallowed back the last of the blood behind his teeth, and waited. 

The man at the table was heavy-set, strong-looking, tattooed and be-ringed. He looked like a good many of the other people in this tavern, on this island. In his round face, whiskered and shaved bald, his eyes were glinting.

He took his time looking James up and down, and then he said, “All right— who the fuck _are_ you, then?” 

James opened his mouth, and grinned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> James, anachronistically, reads from a 2002 translation of the _Meditations_ , addresses the wife of a Lord as “Ma’am”, and owns a naval uniform (or doesn’t any more)— all of which make appearances, anachronistically, in the show. Any other anachronisms are unintentional, but my God, I tried.
> 
> If you enjoyed this story, you can also reblog it [on tumblr](https://justlikeeddie.tumblr.com/post/177968260897/some-affair-equestrianstatue-black)!


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